Google and SEO consultants advise us against using high quality images and add penalties when considering page optimization.
Why they would want to do this may be as we have already discussed in previous chapters about Google Chrome download speed deception because hey, why would they bother if they weren't trying to save on data costs?
But a gross inconvenience? The designer can no longer decide how he wants to present his product images... now its decided by some algorithm simply to try and cheat on the data costs of their cache engine that they thought was a good idea so that they can promote an otherwise useless Firefox browser clone?
Okay, so some people may say that often images have not been optimized for web pages and have come straight from a digital camera (resolution too high) and yes in some cases this may apply. But how will those people know that they are being penalized? If that sounds sneaky its because it is!
And then we have situations where the web page designer has used high quality or high resolution images on purpose, a professional decision that is seemingly penalized by amateurs at Google?
Why would anyone want to use images of higher quality than a bare essential and thus make their pages download quicker? Well I can think of several reasons very quickly:
- images provided as clip art for download
- images meant for display on high resolution monitors
- images provided for exploration by an magnification tool
- images displaying products in fine detail
I say that if Google wants to impress us with a web browser that is merely a clone but downloads faster, then they should pay for the cheat and not us!
