: SEO impact of dynamically serving cropped images based on device type I have a website and try to optimize it regarding device size. Due to a large image slider on the front page I could
I have a website and try to optimize it regarding device size. Due to a large image slider on the front page I could halve the size by serving smaller images for mobile devices (via simple user-agent detection combined with browser properties (width/height) in session). The mechanism works by replacing the URLs from ../image.png to ../image-small.png, everything else on the page stays the same.
My questions are:
Should I use "Vary: User Agent HTTP header" because I serve different HTML?
Might this affect the ranking due to Google preferring responsive over dynamic serving?
Should I rework my cropping mechanism?
EDIT: The content is delivered via a CMS and I can change URLs in the templating pipeline but I cannot parse them in a CSS file. The main question is if this affects my ranking and does the header "Vary" fix this?
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The only SEO that might change by dynamically serving an appropriate sized image for the device would be the ranking of that image itself in Google image search.
Google is fine with serving different content to different devices as long as you treat Googlebot mobile user agents the same way that you would treat the corresponding mobile device. They have said that there is no ranking preference for responsive, vs user agent sniffing vs separate mobile site.
Using a "Vary: User Agent" HTTP header would be a good idea because proxies that cache your page wouldn't serve the wrong image to the wrong device for you.
Before your question was clarified, you had said that you had a responsive site. Here is how you would use responsive CSS to change the image based on browser size:
@media screen and (max-width:480px) {
#myimage {
background:url('/smaller-image.png');
}
} @media screen and (min-width:481px) {
#myimage {
background:url('/bigger-image.png');
}
}
Using user agent sniffing is not actually considered to be responsive. User agent sniffing is a fine technique for creating a mobile site from Google's ranking perspective.
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