Hi I know that having missing images on a website is bad but do the search engines take this into account for ranking or do the not know that the image is not there What are peoples opinion
Your users will be more annoyed than anything, get rid of the silly red X of doom, and draw some happy picture, even a stick figure to replace it if you had to. It might have weight for the Image search engines (Google Images), as the image will be a 404, and won't be indexed, but I don't think it really hurt you, as search engines can only see the title/alt text within the <img src""> tags. But there's really no reason for an image to be missing in the first place . Remember that SE's can't read images (yet).