My blog posts have a section at the bottom which displays a link to related articles along with a thumbnail image from the related post. Traditionally the thumbnail is just that, a tiny version of the big image found on the next page. I've been tinkering with the blog and found a way to speed it up (dramatically) for users but Google is not handling it well in image search.
What I did was stop creating thumbnails and instead I show the full image but size it as a thumbnail. I know that might sound counter-intuitive to page speed and performance, loading full sized images is slower, but it's not in this case.
It's not because the site takes full advantage of browser caching and the images are downloaded in parallel via a sub-domain. They are also at the bottom of the page and care was taken not to block anything from loading with them so a visitor does not see a delay. The pages finish loading in the same amount of time thanks to parallel hosting.
The effect is image pre-loading. This section of the site, when a visitor finally reaches it, has a high CTR and the images used are the FIRST image from the next page which are all above the fold. Since they are loaded and cached when a visitor clicks to next page the image instantly appears. All of these things combined have sped things up for real visitors, quite a bit actually.
Google images: Most of the time Google is able to associate an image with the right page but I'm seeing some instances where Google thinks the image belongs to the wrong page. Technically Google is right, the image is 'also' on that page but in reality it's part of another post.
Is there a method of telling Google that an image belongs on page x? an image sitemap of sorts perhaps? Whatever solution I come up with has to work on all browsers and for any search engine. Suggestions?
