: Remove user avatars for search engine crawler? I recently found out that especially my forum pages are loading slowly (it doesn't feel like it for me, but google's webmaster tools mentions 5s
I recently found out that especially my forum pages are loading slowly (it doesn't feel like it for me, but google's webmaster tools mentions 5s and more).
I was wondering if this could be because user's avatars? The avatars are not hosted on my website, and some users have animated gifs or needlessly large images (>250KB).
Would it be a good idea to not load avatars when a search engine visits my website?
I know they will then be missing from google's cached pages, but will it speed up my website, and perhaps improve my page's ranking?
More posts by @Looi9037786
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If you hide these from the search engines you risk being banned for cloaking. Cloaking is when you serve different content to the search engines for the explicit purpose of manipulating your rankings which is exactly what you would be doing by hiding these from the search engines.
If these avatars are so large and hurting your page loading speed then it's also hurting your users' experience, not only the search engines. You should consider dealing with the real issue which these excessively large avatars. Make it a rule that avatars can only be a certain size or smaller and block any that are too large. Then both your users and the search engines will be happier with your forum pages.
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