In a recent Search Off the Record podcast, Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller from Google talked about how important image filenames are. At one point, they mentioned a big mistake that people often make when it comes to deal with Google on Image filenames.
How important filenames are
Google’s help pages don’t say if image filenames are used to rank websites.
But they do say that Google keeps track of them to help figure out what the image is about.
Because of this, Google suggests giving image files names that make sense.
Google’s image guidelines documentation states:
“Likewise, the filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG. If you localize your images, make sure you translate the filenames, too.”
It’s a good idea to give images meaningful filenames because it makes it easier to organize if you can look at the filename and know what the image is about.
How important are filenames for images?
Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller from Google start their conversation by agreeing that filenames are important. They then talk about how important they are in general.
Lizzi Sassman:
So another part where you could focus your attention, I guess, would be the filename.So words for the name of the image itself. How important is that?
Because that’s not an area where I have not invested much effort, but I don’t know, like should we? What if I went and just changed all of the images on our site to have a different filename? To be more descriptive or, I don’t know… put like more words there too, like in addition to alt text?John Mueller: We do recommend doing something with the filenames in our image guidelines.
So having descriptive filenames is good. But I don’t think you would see a significant change if you already do the other things around images, like the alt texts, the text surrounding the image. Those are really, really strong signals. And the filename itself is often… it’s kind of from a technical point of view.
This is what we called it, but it doesn’t provide any real unique information, usually.
Of course, if you don’t do the alt text, or if you don’t have good surrounding text, then, of course, the filename might be the only place where you mention what this image is about.
But if you do the rest, then usually the filenames are okay.”
Something You Should Know About How Google Finds Images
Next, John Mueller talks about an important technical point about how Google crawls images and why this is something to think about when optimizing images on a website that is already popular.
John Mueller:
And the other thing with filenames, especially for images, is when we crawl images, we tend not to crawl them as often, because usually, they don’t change a lot.
Lizzi Sassman:
Oh.John Mueller:
So that means if you change all of the filenames across the website, then it’s going to take a lot of time for Google’s systems to see, “Oh, well, this is a new image, and we have to kind of look at it at some point.”And to understand kind of that connection between the old image and the new one, that’s something that’s just going to take a very long time.
So if you changed all of them at once, my guess is… I don’t know, over a period of a couple of months at least, it’ll be kind of annoying in Image Search in that we kind of drop the old ones first because they’re no longer mentioned on the page and pick up the new ones in a really slow way.
So that’s something where I would try to only do that if it’s really, really critical.
Like when we did the transition from Blogger to the new set up for the blog posts.
Of course, the images had to be moved as well.
And at that point, it was like, “Sure.” It was like, “Change the filename, move the image to a different URL.” “
The most important thing to take away from this is that Google doesn’t crawl images very often, and renamed images may not be indexed for months.
Changing file names doesn’t change much.
Another important thing to learn is that changing the filename of an image that has already been crawled and indexed doesn’t help as much as you might think.
“But otherwise, once they’re moved on the site, and you’re just like tweaking things, and it was like, “Oh, I have a new system for image filenames.”
I don’t think that would make it better.
That probably would have minimal effect, maybe no visible effect at all.
Lizzi Sassman:
For the amount of effort, yeah.John Mueller:
And everything drops out for a couple of months. It’s no fun.
Lizzi Sassman:
And room for human error too. To like miss a broken link.If you need to go swap out, where are these images embedded and stuff.
You could cause more problems with just a mistake of forgetting to update various places where those images were used.”
I can imagine things going wrong.”
Google on Image Filenames and SEO
This part of Google’s podcast talked about image filenames at least four times.
- Image filenames that describe what the image is about are helpful for Image Search because they help Google figure out what the image is about.
- The alt text and the text around the image tell you more about what the image is than the filename.
- If an image has already been indexed, changing the filename has “minimal effect” and probably won’t enhance it.
- If you change the filename of an image that has already been indexed, the image may not be crawled or indexed for months.
Our other Blog posts
6 Top Places to Hire WordPress Developers
Sometimes you need the help of a WordPress Professional. As WordPress is so widely used, there is no shortage of
Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make When Using SEO
Know Which Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid to Grow Your Local Business In spite of the importance of search engine
FREE AI Chatbot For WordPress using ChatGPT
How to install a ChatGPT AI Chatbot for WordPress Have you ever wished you could create a chatbot for your