Are aliases included in site spidering?

[Kendo]

I just now tried some SEO software recommended in another post and have seen similar behavior in other apps. I suspect that Google behaves similarly, in that when spidering a web site, that aliases of that domain are included.

For example any links to images.example.com are seen as example.com. If this is the case then I need to move my CDN images to a different domain name altogether?

Even though images.example.com is on a different web server on the other side of the world?

[Andy Langton]

You might need to rephrase the question. Google will certainly associate images.example.com with example.com. That isn't the same as images.example.com being the same as example.com. But why would this be a problem, in any case?

Basic crawling will see subdomains as more-or-less separate entities, but if you reference images served via images.example.com in the HTML of example.com, then those would be fetched when Google renders the page.

[RedBar]

I don't know if this is of any assistance however until the very early noughties I used to serve all my images for 200+ sites from one specific domain, example.com.

I then started to notice that G would rank those images highly under example.com and NOT under their respective domains such as example.uk, example.in, example.de etc

This was useless for me since at that time image search was huge for us, in excess of 100,000 views a day, therefore I took the decision for every site to have and deliver its own images and continues to today.

[Kendo]

I moved the larger images, mostly banners, from images.example.com to example.net. My aim is to improve page speed. Speed rating is currently good for desktop but terrible for mobile for some reason. So I'll wait and see if there is any improvement for example.com.

[levo]

SEO-wise, it shouldn't matter if the images are hosted on the main or subdomain. Google only indexes the pages that images appear, not the image by itself.

Speed-wise, if you've switched to https and your server supports http2, hosting everything (css, js, images) on your main domain is faster. But there are more important variables than the hostname, run the Lighthouse report in Chrome, and see if your images are optimized or it has any other suggestions.

[RedBar]

but terrible for mobile for some reason

Is that using wifi or your network provider?

[Kendo]

Is that using wifi or your network provider?

I don't even have a mobile that will display web pages. It is GoogleSearchConsole that is reporting 3-5 seconds seconds page speed.

[RedBar]

GoogleSearchConsole

I've read a lot of dubious comments about GSC, how do you know if it's correct or not if you don't physically check on a mobile?

[Andy Langton]

Google Search Console speed data is from user testing via the Chrome User Experience Project, so is about as accurate as you're likely to get, as long as your site gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

[Kendo]

Google Search Console speed data is from user testing via the Chrome User Experience Project

So it is governed by the user's Internet connection? That says it all with the server in the US and most hits coming from India.

[Andy Langton]

So it is governed by the user's Internet connection? That says it all with the server in the US and most hits coming from India.

From Google's perspective, your site speed is speed as experienced by users, which makes sense to me. They do record "effective connection type" - [developers.google.com...]

[RedBar]

most hits coming from India.

India's connections vary hugely across the country.

I have people sending me WhatsApp images and videos, literally in the middle of nowhere but mostly the south, over 4G and they are immediate, yet in other areas of the country it's not even snail-paced.

Of course it also used to depend on the users' handsets however this past 2-3 years these have also improved dramatically.

I have a lot of global mobile users and whenever I launch anything new / different, I have a dozen or so test it in their area, I do not appear to have had an issue in years but, then again, I've always been fanatical about getting html5 to work to its full potential for users.

[Kendo]

connections vary hugely across the country

Some more testing from mobiles around the world... lucky I have a lot of ISPs in China blocked, because then those figures would be counted in the "user experience" and it looks like they have terrible internet connections... page speeds increased from 3 to 8-12 secs on iPhone.

Maybe I should block India too because most of those hits will be unwanted. My live logging shows a lot of naughty queries probing for WordPress and other vulnerabilities. I block China for that reason but we employ a few coders from India.

[RedBar]

and it looks like they have terrible internet connections

I have two offices in southern China and their Net cinnections are full-on 4G and great, even going down the local motorways I don't have a problem however it is a HUGE country therefore I have no idea outside of that specific region what connectivity is like.

[Kendo]

and their Net connections are full-on 4G

The 4G test does give better results.

[RedBar]

How heavy are the pages you're having a problem with?

[Kendo]

How heavy are the pages

Originally:
- Script 300k
- Image 264k
- HTML 59k
- CSS 44k
- Other 23k

But they have since dropped right and left side columns for mobile plus lazyload of images is now being added. Also the Live Support chatbox has been removed for mobile which should be a huge reduction for scripts.

[Kendo]

After some revision:

- Script 205k (removed chatbox and used later js which is slightly smaller)
- Image 61k (compressed all images - quality not great on a wide page)
- HTML 49k (2 side columns removed)
- CSS 28k (removed unused styling)

Now getting 3.3 secs using Google Nexus 10 although getting 2.5 sec on 4G. No HTTP/2 on that server. Looks like the best I can do. Lazyload js added 7 k and is working but I still see all images included in the page speed list. Google may not count it so have to wait and see what GoogleSearchConsole reports in a few days.