Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there a limit to images file names?
-
Hi,
I have an eCommerce site with hundreds of product images.
For management reasons files are named in length to have the product details in them.
Is there a limit for a filename length before it is considered ambiguous or spammy etc.?
(it usually ranges 50-70 chars).Thanks
-
I agree with Sean - I've never heard of an official limit to image filenames in terms of length alone. Since the file name is almost always part of the image URL, you could be running the risk of too-long URLs but that's a relatively minor problem. I would make extra sure that your file names don't appear keyword-stuffed, though - so watch out for things like repeating keywords or having all variations of a keyword. There's a big difference between widgets-extralarge-round-blue-widgetmaker.jpg and blue-widgets-best-blue-widgets-blue-widgets-online-free-shipping, if that makes sense. Other than that you should be fine.
-
I've never encountered an official limit to image filenames, and I'm not sure there is any SEO impact (other than just the engines ignoring alot of the filename in their crawl). Putting the product description in the filename seems VERY unnecessary and I would try to get some rationale around that. But for the web usage overall, I've never encountered a filename that is too long. 50-70 characters is alot but not prohibitively.
-
Thanks.
The only other way I see to maintain order and shorten the filename is to place them within folders:
domain.com/images/products/category-name/product-title.jpg
VS
domain.com/images/products/product-title-product-category.jpg
But then I can have several exact same file-names (that are placed on different categories)
-
Hi, 50-70 characters does seem quite spammy to me, but then if you watch the Image SEO Basics Whiteboard Friday by Aaron Wheeler, he says that image filename length has much the same character length as Alt Text, so on that basis the answer would be no.
It would be interesting to hear others feedback on this.
Peter
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why are my site images hosted by secureservercdn.net?
All of my image links are hosted on secureservercdn.net. for example, if i go to a webpage, mydomain.com/blog/blog-post and right click any image with a "copy image address" the images are all linking to secureservercdn.net/blablabla rather than mydomain.com/wp-uploads/blalblabla. this cannot be good for SEO. Any ideas why this would be? My site is hosted through GoDaddy, is it on their end? Thanks, Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Image Audit: Getting a list of *ALL* Images on a Site?
Hello! We are doing an image optimization audit, and are therefore trying to find a way to get a list of all images on a site. Screaming Frog seems like a great place to start (as per this helpful article: https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-perform-an-image-optimization-audit), but unfortunately, it doesn't include images in CSS. 😞 Does the community have any ideas for how we try to otherwise get list of images? Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image
There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
Combining images with text as anchor text
Hello everyone, I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy. Here is an example (I'll keep it simple): Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories: Christmas Classical Traditional So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like: Christmas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
Classical
Traditional Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like: "christmas violin sheet music" "classical violin sheet music" "traditional violin sheet music" I would be tempted to make the above links as follows: Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these: Christmas
Classical
Traditional That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs. My questions are: 1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint? 2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!1 -
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
How to See Image Metadata?
We sell 1000s of audiobooks and get our cover images and descriptions from the publisher’s sites. When I download a cover image such as this one (http://www.audiobooksonline.com/media/Alex-Cross-Run-James-Patterson.jpg)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
I always rename and re-size it before installing at our Web store. Would this process result in any publisher’s metadata in the image we use at our Web store and/or anything else Google would not like?
Is there an online utility that would allow me to see metadata in our images?0
