Ever noticed how some people on the comments on this, and other blogs have an image next to their name, and some don’t?
Ever wondered why?
As it happens, it is quite easy – and all you need to do is set up an account with a specific website to host the image, and it will then work across a vast number of websites.
The website is www.gravatar.com and you just need to create an account with the email address you use when commenting on blogs and other websites.
Thereafter, each time you make a comment using that email address, most blogs will automatically pull down your image from the Gravatar website and put it next to your comment.
Yes, it’s free of charge and doesn’t seem to be evil.
Thank you for that.
We use Gravatar for both of our sites. We’ve recently discovered that the calls for images to Gravatar were taking long enough to kick our Google page ranking down a few places. It’s not massively noticeable unless you have lots of comments but it’s enough that we’ve decided to do it in house.
A lot of images would slow a page down – although I suspect you could probably cache the images locally as well.
However, page speed is “only 1 out of 200 factors” used to rank a website according to Google, so I am not sure if just the page speed was responsible for such a big drop in SERPS. Curious though.