would lazy-loading img src negatively impact SEO

Question

I\'m working on a shopping site. We display 40 images in our results. We\'re looking to reduce the onload time of our page, and since images block the onload event, I\'m con

Answer 1

We display 40 images in our results.

first question, is this page even a landing page? is it targeted for a specific keyword? internal search result pages are not automatically landing pages. if they are not a landingpage, then do whatever you want with them (and make sure they do not get indexed by google).

if they are a landingpages (a page targeted for a specific keyword) the performance of the site is indeed important, for the conversion rate of these pages and indirectly (and to a smaller extend also directly) also for google. so a kind of lazy load logic for pages with a lot of images is a good idea.

i would go for:

load the first two (product?) images in an SEO optimized way (as normal HTML, with a targeted alt text and a targeted filename). for the rest of the images make a lazy load logic. but not just setting the src= to blank, but insert the whole img tag onload (or onscroll, or whatever) into your code.

having a lot of broken img tags in the HTML for non javacript users (i.e.: google, old mobile devices, textviewer) is not a good idea (you will not get a penalty as long as the lazy loaded images are not missleading) but shitty markup is never a good idea.

for general SEO question please visit https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ (stack overflow is more for programing related questions)