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
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
-
301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File
Hi everyone, I have a site on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level: https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr , https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc. We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not. It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong. I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amberprata0 -
Image Sitemap for non indexed Products
Hi, we have several ecommerce sites. We want to do an image sitemap, as we have lots of attractive images. The question is, can you put images for non-indexed products there as well, or does that conflict with the normal sitemap (the images would be indexed, the products not)? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file
We've setup an new site and many pages don't exist anymore (clean up done). But for many of them we have new pages with new url's. We've monitored the 404 and have now many URL's redirected with 301 (apache file). How long should we keep this in place? Checking all links manually to see of new url is in place of the old url (in google) is too much work. tx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC0 -
Moving to a new domain name - 301 redirect NOT an option
Hi everyone My question concerns moving from an old to a new domain name without losing all previous SEO efforts. I am aware that a properly executed 301 redirect is the answer and way to go as well as telling Google about it in Webmaster Tools. However, what is the situation, if you do not own the old domain name anymore? If you have no means of getting back the old domain name and wanting to basically mask/switch the already existing website to the new domain name, will search engines penalise the "new site" as a duplicate, since the "old site" is still in the search engine rankings? I know that not being able to execute a proper 301 redirect and starting out with a new domain means a fresh start, but what is the best way to minimise the negative impact (if any)? Basically dropping the sites' current content and starting out new in favour of the new domain name is not really an option. Even if you were to take the content from the old site and place it on another site, this would surely be seen as duplicate too. Anyone thinks that Webmaster Tools/Google is savvy enough to spot the difference when the "old site" gets removed and the "new one" added instead (in Webmaster Tools). I read something along the lines about having your host point the DNS from the old site to the new one. Could something like be helpful? Thanks all in advance for your help and input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
How are PDF image alt tags and "subject" field in document properties used for search
Hello, 1. Does google use image alt tags? According to this 2011 document, the answer is no, but I have seen others claiming yes- has google since begun using alt tags for images within PDFs? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html I am trying to decide if it is worth updating existing PDFs with alt tags for images for the purpose of SEO. 2. How does Google use the "Subject" field in document properties for a PDF? Should it be used as a description field for the document, similar to a meta description? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | winstoncho0 -
My own brand name disappeared from google?
Hi, about 20-30 hours ago my own brand name disappeared from google results (We redirected old domain to new one about a month ago) My website is: www.websiteplanet.com If you search for Website Planet in google you will not find our homepage any longer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
Not only that the brand name disappeared but we also dropped in rankings and lost about %50 of the organic traffic we had. It's important for me to say that we have never done any sort of blackhat or even greyhat SEO, at all. I could probably come up with many ideas of why it happened but maybe one of you mozzers already experienced this and could enlighten me. Will really appreciate any kind of response/help. Thanks.0 -
Company name often shows in anchor text (important keyword phrase within), can this impact ranking?
Hi everyone, My company is called "Hawaii Job Engine" - www.hawaiijobengine.com - and many sites that link to my site use my company name as anchor text "Hawaii Job Engine". I have heard Google may devalue a certain keyword phrase if used too often in anchor text. Does this mean I may, over time, get a poor ranking for the term "Hawaii Job" since that phrase is part of my company's name. Or, will search engines easily notice it is my company name and therefore it will not have a negative impact on rankings? Example: if the anchor text leading to my company's homepage is company's name 95% of the time (on authoritative sites) could this be an issue? I don't know the %, but just to establish if there may be in % levels to keep in mind. thank you, Kristian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1