lazy load images and SEO

Question

Hi everyone,

I am looking into implement a lazy load feature on image on a website, however I am wondering if there is any SEO downfalls to this. The script i'm looking into is the following:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46393

Bascially, when an image tag appears in the users viewing area of the browser, javascript is called which replaces and loads the image on the fly. This downsizes the initial page load time. But, how might this affect SEO, particually image crawlers?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Most crawlers won't execute Javascript. So you have to ensure that your images are displayed, or at least a temporary ones (low res) with proper alt tag.

Then it's not a problem to replace it by the high resolution one.

Please note that this won't work with Google Image Search, and therefore will affect your exposure on that search engine.