will having images loading from multiple domains hurt SEO?

Question

i have 3 domains that are multilanguage and all hosted in the same servers/databases

for example: thanks.com/en , gracias.com/es and danke.com/de

so in terms of text content there is no duplicate content, since each text is properly translated.

the problem i am facing is with images.

for example: a_cow.jpg is the same for all domains and will be loading at thanks.com/a_cow.jpg , gracias.com/a_cow.jpg and danke.com/a_cow.jpg

my question is if this will be counted as duplicated content by search engines, since the same image can be accessed from multiple domains.

should i force them to load all in one domain? for example, in gracias.com load the image with thanks.com / a_cow.jpg

i can do that in htaccess but i am wondering if i should do it or not, and what are the pros and cons.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

my question is if this will be counted as duplicated content by search engines, since the same image can be accessed from multiple domains.

It will count as duplicate image, but not duplicate content as it is typically understood in SEO. It is only an issue if you are trying to get traffic from those images. Since they have different URLs, they will be considered as different images in competition for the same traffic, although they are the same.

should i force them to load all in one domain? for example, in gracias.com load the image with thanks.com / a_cow.jpg

Not if you don't care about getting traffic from these images. Otherwise, it would help yes.

but on the other hand, the other 2 domains will load images from a external domain.

That is not an issue. Keep in mind that if you load images from one domain only, it is that domain that will get the traffic, not the others.