Image size effects SEO?

I’ve been experimenting with image size and it’s effect on SEO.  A client of WebGrowth’s had a Page Rank of 2 on their particular page. On this page they inserted a huge 1 megabyte image, which obviously took a while to load. Their Page Rank dropped to zero once Google had re-indexed this page. Although I don’t have conclusive evidence that the image was the reason why the Page Rank slipped to zero, nothing else had changed on the website so one has to wonder..

Since then I have changed the image to a thumbnail and used a lightbox plugin to enlarge the image. Once Google has re-indexed this page it will test this theory and I will provide the results towards the end of the month.

Some good tools to use to measure your own page speed are the following:

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html

For more information regarding page speed read Google’s Best Practises for Page Performance.

NOTE: WebGrowth has no affiliation to the above mentioned companies.

About Neil Pursey

Neil Pursey has written 138 post in this blog.

Founder of WebGrowth, co-partner of ThinkSEO and GROW Academy. Passionate about WordPress. Happily married to his beautiful wife.

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