How to change images of a page without loosing ranking?
-
Hi,
I have two reasons to change some images of a page on a wordpress site:
1.Google speed service advise me to optmize the images size to better spead load times.
2.I want to change images titles (to improve seo optimization for the page keyword), so i need to replace them, since im using wordpress.
Now the question is:
Can i just change the images without worring about any related seo issues? Or should i follow some best practice to change images in order to not affect the ranking of the page?
tx for your support!
-
You're welcome.
If you have the answer to your question, you should mark one or more responses with "good answer" so this thread can be closed.
-
ok i see your point, thanks so much for your tips, precious!
-
It's a personal choice but I don't see any harm in leaving it activated. I think there's more of a risk that tables will get corrupted if you are periodically deactivating and reactivating but that's just my opinion. If it's a concern, you would be better off posing your question to the plugin author.
-
Hi Donna, do you think i can activate the plugin just when i need to replace images or is better to leave it always activated?
-
Tx David!
-
Tx so much, it seems the perfect plugin for the purpose!
-
Dreamrealemedia,
Use the Enable Media Replace plugin by Måns Jonasson. It will swap out the old image for the new, update all your links, and you'll be good to go. No 404 errors.
-
Tx,
what about image result in google?
If i change image, the old image will still appear in image google research and it will link to my page or does it will generate a 404 erorr when i try to click to the associated page (since now is not anymore in that page)?
-
Hi Dreamrealemedia,
I would have absolutely no concerns about losing rankings/traffic from making the changes you've mentioned.
Optimizing image files to improve page load and improving keyword targeting in title/alt text - you can't go wrong with that.
Cheers,
David
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
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Static content pages ranking dropping all the time
Hello all. I have been working three months in my current job in the hotel industry. I have been publishing a lot of content to our website (mainly articles), which in general have been ranking well and really boosted our website traffic. The problem that I am facing, though, is the fact that our static pages' rankings are basically constantly dropping. Especially one of our main pages, which is this hotel page. I haven't been doing any real changes to the content, but the ranking (with keywords "hotelli helsinki" [Hotel in Helsinki in Finnish]) has plummeted from 13th position all the way down to 19th... What has been happening during these last three months is that we did change to a new domain and we have done all the redirections and also informed Google about this change through search console. I have also done some minor changes to the on-page content, such as changing the meta titles and descriptions as well as the page title and some of the text content to more natural ones instead of clumsy SEO texts and optimizing the images. This hasn't helped at all though and the rankings seem to steadily drop all the time. What would YOU do with this page? Maybe add more text content to the page to be more informative? All tips would be highly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | haapalatuomas0 -
Is page speed important to improve SEO ranking?
I saw on a SEO Agency's site (https://burstdgtl.com/search-engine-optimization/) that page speed apparently affects Google ranking. Is this true? And if it is, how do I improve it, do I need an agency?
On-Page Optimization | | jasparcj0 -
Variations and Rankings
How do search engines view wording variances? I am trying to target Scottish Wedding Photographer but will google/bing etc be intelligent enough to see plurals, see the word Scotland instead of Scottish, photography instead of photographer? Also with rankings, I had a secondary phrase there to which I'm ranking sort of page 2-3 at the moment (the site is circa 3 months old) but finding that I'm nowhere with the Scottish phrase, I checked 30 pages of results and show nowhere, is this due to the competition for my phrase? My site is www.martinwardphotography.com
On-Page Optimization | | MartinWardPhoto0 -
Should I watermark my product images
I am in the process of creating new images for my products to use on my website. Are there any advantages or disadvantages of watermarking each image? Is there an SEO impact good or bad? I am aware that filename and Alt tags are important, but am unsure if google dislikes watermarked images.
On-Page Optimization | | BipSum1 -
What precaution should we take to change the default page of the site
For some reason we wanted to change the default page of my site from example.com to example.com/default.aspx. We will be using 301 redirection to get the back link benefits. Do we need to make any changes in webmaster tool and sitemap too??
On-Page Optimization | | CyrilWilson0 -
Could incorrect H1 tag stop a page ranking?
A few weeks ago I added an image to the top of each page and somehow (I've only just noticed) the image was inside an h1 tag. Presumably this would be the first element google would crawl and would it consider the image the h1 possibly confusing google about the pages content? My actual h1 further down the page would then possible be disregarded by google? The pages I am talking about have dropped in google and I wonder if this could have been the issue?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Fixed horrible title tag on home page, and lost ranking. Will it come back?
I was helping out someone on their site and its home page ranked on page 2 for their term, and the title tag was horrible. It was 160 characters long with lots of near repetitive keywords ([keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] etc.) -- typical title that Google would penalize when it got around to it. So I created a title that made sense, for the keyword, and that followed the best practices of Google recommendations. Now it's dropped off the index. (EDIT: sorry, still in index, just not even in top 1000) Is this something I should not have done? I was just trying to keep them from getting slammed. And, how long should I expect it to take to get my ranking back? This is the only page title I changed.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0