Image SEO

[BlackCat]

I have a question dealing with images on a site. If the images are hosted elsewhere (Flickr, Imgur, Imageshack, etc) besides the site's domain, does Google's search engine still include the images on their search results? In other words, can Google index images off websites that are hosted by other websites or are they ignored? Would having proper alt tags on these third-party hosted images make it to where the images are indexed?

Newb question but thanks for reading.

[Zorro]

I don't specialize in SEO, but I do believe Google will index your site's images as expected, even if they're hosted externally. The Google bots basically scan web "pages" in order to find images, and any images they find and index will be associated with that web page. A lot of bigger websites will often host images and media externally on cloud CDNs provided by services like Rackspace CloudFiles and Amazon S3; in such cases, Google still associates such media with the web page the bots originally found the image(s) at. Also, the Google bots will tend to give you higher image indexes/ranks if the images embedded on your web page are unique. If multiple websites and social media pages are using the same image, Google will not give you as high of a page rank.

[BlackCat]

Excellent information. Thank you!