Yes agree completely with

demonhale — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:10:16 +0000

Yes agree completely with the posts above, separate servers for the main site and image files, if you can also observe this can pose problems sometimes. Especially when the image server goes offline and you get a site with no images at all... Although it is a good practice for heavy trafficked sites...

What you're talking about is

JeevesBond — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:37:06 +0000

What you're talking about is a CDN or Content Delivery Network.

I don't believe this has any effect on SEO. You'll get more results by working on better content, and getting relevant backlinks.

If you see images on a

michaelg — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:43:53 +0000

If you see images on a different domain - even different sub domain - it's probably because the images are on a completely different server. On a site that pulls a high amount of traffic, static content such as images are often hosted on a different server from the dynamic pages and database stuff.

Aha ! That makes sense- thank you

I happen to look at the

michaelg — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:41:30 +0000

I happen to look at the source code for a gaming web site the other day, what I noticed was the usual HTML body text and links (relative urls) but the src was http/:images.game.com/xxx.jpg) All the links were full path. I was talking about this with another web designer and that is when the discussion came up about possible easier to download. Or SEO as because the page is somehow lighter ( I am not sure about that one). So I thought I would ask.

I see your point about reducing the server load, this might be useful for heavy graphic sites. Which is the next project that I am working on.
Thanks for the help.

I have heard that it allows

pr0gr4mm3r — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:23:53 +0000

I have heard that it allows for faster download since you are doing a simultaneous download the images are are being called from one place and the content is being called from another? Is this correct?

Nope, your browser can load multiple images at once, and it doesn't matter if they are on the same or different domains.

I have also heard that it helps with SEO since the crawler can easily extract the text? Is this true?

Nope, with the exception of Google Images, search engines only grab the text anyway.

Can you give me an example

Megan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:05:53 +0000

Can you give me an example of what you mean? I can't say I'd ever noticed a site that was puling images from an entierly separate domain. It could help to reduce server load since weight is spread across multiple machines, although I can think of better ways to handle that problem.

I can't think of how this would make any difference at all for SEO (unless I'm not understanding what you're talkin about!)