Search engine optimization is a very dynamic field but recently there’s not much to cover for us except the periodic Google Search Algorithm updates.
Lucky for us this week, we have a few updates for you.
No SEO benefits of hosting your website on your own domain
If you are reading this SEO roundup then most probably, you either run your own blog or manage search optimizations of your clients’ sites, either way, site speed is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account.
One of the most resource intensive factors is image hosting. How fast the images on your website load directly affects the speed performance of the overall website. Now, it makes sense to host the images on your own domain so as to get more traffic from Google Image Search, however, Google’s John Mueller has a different take on the SEO benefit of hosting images on your own domain.
According to Mueller, there is no specific SEO benefit of hosting images on your own domain. According to him, you can host images on your domain or another domain name but it should not impact their image ranks.
Here’s his tweet:
It doesn't matter how you host the images, there's no SEO-bonus for having them on the same host/domain. However, since changing image URLs is "hard", I'd use your own hostname for the CDN (avoid https://t.co/Y1ND46l9ij and use https://t.co/fWMc6CFPZ0), so you can change CDNs.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) March 5, 2019
That being said it is a good idea to host images on your own domain as you will have better control over them. Hosting images on other domain will mean a lot of hard work in case you lose the domain or want to change CDN in future.
Google Shoppable Ads In Image Search
Now, this is interesting, I am always amazed how Google finds out new ways to monetize its search content. In a recent innovative development, Google is testing a new ad format with image search that is named the ‘Shoppable Ads’. During the test phase, Google is seen highlighting multiple products available for sale with sponsored ads among the image results.
Here’s how it works in action:
As it is shown, the sponsored ads have an image with a price tag and when you click the price tag the items available for sale in the image will be highlighted with their price, brand and more.
Google made a statement that they will “continue to roll this out to more categories across more retailers over the next few months.” They further added that they are planning on “bringing Showcase Shopping ads to Google Images as well.”
This is all in this week’s SeoEaze SEO roundup.
