Moving images to a subdomain on a different server

[nmjudy]

Could there be a negative impact (as far as Google ranking) if I host images to a website on a different server? I've setup a subdomain and pointed it to a dedicated address on another server. This was done to help with page load in lieu of load balancing.

I wasn't sure if I should disallow indexing in the subdomain's robots.txt file. I hate to loose any image referrals, but it doesn't make sense to just give access to images with no other content. Any suggestions?

[tedster]

This is a common situation, and it is a best practice for high traffic websites. I've never seen a negative impact on the ranking of pages because of it.

In fact, Google Image Search seems to try to accommodate the practice too, because they will often credit an image to a site that hotlinks to it, rather than the actual owner's site.

[HuskyPup]

I've never seen a negative impact on the ranking of pages because of it.

No negative impact for the page if all the attributes are completed correctly however there can definitely sometimes be a very big impact for image only search rankings in Google.