Google’s John Mueller warns site owners that altering image URLs can impact their rankings in image search results. This is especially important for sites that receive significant traffic from Google Images. Changing an image URL, even if it’s the same image on the same page, will cause Google to treat it as a new image, necessitating crawling, processing, reindexing, and regaining its ranking, which could take a while since images are not crawled as frequently as web pages.
The issue of image search rankings was discussed during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, where a participant asked whether altering image URLs would affect their search rankings and if setting up redirects was advisable. Mueller confidently affirmed that changing image URLs would indeed impact rankings, but the negative effects can be mitigated by implementing redirects. Redirecting old image URLs to new ones helps transfer ranking signals from the previous images to the new versions. Setting up redirects is an excellent way to handle this situation, according to Mueller.
Avoid changing image URLs if possible. However, if it’s necessary, ensure that redirects are established. This advice is particularly pertinent for websites that depend heavily on image search traffic. Since images are not frequently updated, they aren’t crawled as often as web content, making the reprocessing time longer if the URL structure changes significantly. Thus, it’s crucial to have redirects properly configured, especially for sites reliant on Google Images for traffic. Ensure thoroughness with these details to maintain traffic levels.
