Serving images from other servers

Any Google disadvantage?

[mindaugas13]

Can anyone tell me if there are any negative implications in Google (or Y or MSN) from serving images up from another server (another domain) within your pages as opposed to serving it up from your own - as in img src="www.example.com/folder/image.jpg" vs. src="/ownfolder/image.jpg"?

[edited by: ciml at 9:45 am (utc) on April 28, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[larryhatch]

I know of no specific penalties for linking to images on other domains/servers
BUT, if the other domain is somebody else's, you could really step on some toes!
In this case, its always best to ask permission of the other guy.
To do so without permission is called hot-linking (or worse)
and _severely_ frowned upon. There are all sorts of
retaliatory things a hot-linking victim can do.

Maybe you should tell us more about what you are planning to do. -Larry

[mindaugas13]

It's for a real estate site so serving property images from the local board's servers instead of downlodaing them to ours and then serving them from ours would save a lot of hassle for us. So the permissions issue isn't really a problem.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I serve images for my Gallery site from whichever mirror I compute as being "closest" to the user in the hope of giving them better performance and eventually saving me money (transit costs).

So usually my images have been seen to be served from a different base URL than the page that points to them.

Google seems to show images against one of the mirrors or the "main" URL at random, but usually not against more than one, so overall I think there is no problem. The user gets to see one instance of each image in image search.

Rgds

Damon