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.
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
-
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on :
- a) A sites seo ranking
- b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.)
This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :

changed to

-
Agree with Ryan - if you want to make changes - better make the image name a descriptive one.
Also, take care if you get search traffic from image search - changing the name of your images could cause a big negative impact on your traffic. In my experience the image index is updated slower than the normal index - so if 2554.jpg is indexed and you change it to 6842.jpg or even better red-ford-truck.jpg the image in the result will return a 404 and be replaced by the same image from another site (if it's a stock photo) or dropped from the results. Better to keep the old image in the initial location until the index is updated
rgds
Dirk
-
When I write an article the images always have file names that match the content of the image and an important keyword of the article. The alt attributes are more detailed because they provide information to screen readers.
I believe that the names of your image files and the alt attributes are small optimization elements that will help rank a page. It might be enough to move you up a position or two if you are deep in the SERPs, but if you are in a battle for the top three for a competitive term then authority is going to be far more important than the sum of the small optimization elements.
-
Why not change the file name to 'red-for-truck.jpg'? That would probably have a more positive effect. Much of what dictates image optimization is the same as on page factors, as described here: http://moz.com/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think. (On page factors: http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) Plus Google has its own guide for image sitemaps here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636. Cheers!
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 -
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 -
SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?
I'll make this quick and simple. Let's say you have a business located in several cities. You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations). For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL: https://www.mysite.com/dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php or http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Searchout0 -
Does having multiple Domain aliases hurt SEO rank ?
Our company having multiple domain aliases (DIfferent TLD) like example.com, .net, .org, .club, .win to one site (Same Content). We do this because our country ISP is blocking a few of the domain aliases. Question: Does this hurt the SEO rank? What approach is the best for us to gain SEO Rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | missionunpossible0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder. Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible). Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm. Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0