My blog has lots of images. Those images are in a subfolder (example.com/images). People like to hotlink them. Google likes to rank them. Browsers are slow to load them. Feed readers slow down my site with them. Ugh.
What I'd like to do...
- Change nothing on my site itself, with the exception of adding image hotlink protection, but give it a lighter workload. I'd like to change the image location to a sub-domain
. I can code this but I have a concern.
My concern is feeds sending out content with images from the sub-domain causing ranking problems for the images on my blog. How would I effectively make sure the copies do not not get crawled/ranked? Will Google have a problem with seeing one image url on my site but a different image url in my feeds?
Benefits include not putting any load on my main site when I send out a post to a lot of readers/services. Not having to worry about scrapers as much since they'll most likely be using the image copies which I can change them (or delete them) when my feed no longer holds that post.
P.S. I'm leaning towards making a copy of every image because I don't see image redirects being downloadable in parallel. I'm also not hosting images on a sub domain because they rank better from a subfolder.
Advice? Opinions?
