How To Put Lazy-Loaders To Use When They Are Necessary

In a nutshell: No, lazy-loading images aren't bad for SEO. Google themselves actually recommend that you do this for your web pages. While it can introduce a bit of a drawback in general SEO prowess, it can significantly boost your visibility through Google Images. The catch, however, is that not all circumstances are ideal for this trade-off. Google recommends it if your website is posting images that will draw considerable attention such as for medical websites. For those who are just running a simple blog that's mostly walls of text, don't concern yourself with it unless you're willing to optimize the lazy-loaders. There's a bit of a balance at play here. In some ways, I have to reiterate on my opening statement: Yes, lazy-loading images can yield negative results sometimes. What every sprouting webmaster needs to understand is that Google's basic search function — you know, the list of hyperlinks that you get when you enter a query — is the most effective and popular means of generating organic traffic. For this reason, catering to Google Images SEO is more of a specialized task that calls upon a demographic that's more likely to perform image searches instead of the usual contextual searches. However, Google has been picking up the slack on their side of the fence in regards to lazy-loaders, so the drawback isn't going to doom your SEO like it might have years ago. It's one of those "maybe, maybe not" situations. Remember that lazy-loaders can look like blank spaces to a client whose system hasn't loaded them yet, which means they could skip the image entirely, so be sure that their space has been properly defined for clients who begin to scroll down and trip off the lazy-loaders. Of course, also remember that not every image needs to be lazy-loaded. Forget about alt tags; they aren't as relevant as they once were. You can mark the images up with an image schema and let Google's JavaScript handle the rest. This is, of course, if you decide to take Google's advice and roll with lazy-loaders to begin with. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/8t25vp/islazyloadingimagesbadforseo/.