SEO impact: changing animated GIF images to PNG image sprites

SEO impact: changing animated GIF images to PNG image sprites - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about SEO impact: changing animated GIF images to PNG image sprites.Problem :

My project has a lot of GIF images on all pages as it's a library. This makes the page size huge. So I decided to turn all animated GIF images to PNG image sprites (which reduces image size dramatically) and animate them by JS. But now question appears - the project has been showing those GIF images for years, how will that impact SEO? Will it create problems with search engines?

Solution :

Have you tried optimizing the GIF images? Properly made GIFs usually shouldn't be much larger than PNG sprite.

But as far as SEO goes - it shouldn't have much, if any, effect on rankings. Just make sure your JS solution works on all browsers and devices. And maybe have the old GIFs as fallback in noscript tags.

The only way that changing your images would change your web rankings is if users hated your site and stopped using it. As long as your users are happy, your Google rankings aren't going to suffer. In fact, with a faster site ranking could even improve.

I've done countless projects where we change technical details such as scripts, images, and which HTML tags are used. Google rankings don't even blink for such changes unless you royally mess up the site.

If the images are ranking in image search, it is likely that image search rankings will be dramatically changed. To minimize impacts you can either leave the old gifs in place or redirect to the new pngs.

If the issue about seo, google-search, , is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.