Google Advice On How To Optimize Images While Not Hurting Image Search Rankings

May 3, 2021 - 7:41 am 1 by

Google Image Optimization

Google's John Mueller posted a great thread on Twitter about considerations around how to make your images more optimized, so that your pages load faster, while also taking into account how that might impact your rankings in Google Image Search. John posted several tweets on Twitter with the information.

This comes shortly after John posted an excellent Google tutorial on video SEO for Google. But let's focus on John's advice around image optimization and not losing Google rankings, if possible.

(1) Don't forget that if you change your image URL or filename, redirect the old URL of the image to the new one:

(2) Keep in mind, you might not get much image search traffic in the first place and if you do, you can do things to improve your images without changing URLs he said:

(3) Use Search Console to see how much traffic you are getting from image search:

(4) Use Google Page Speed insights to determine what changes you can make to improve your images:

(5) Some image optimization resources:

(6) Here are ways to optimize your images and the pages they are embedded on without changing the filename:

(7) Use compression tools:

(8) Consider using responsive images:

(9) If you need to change file names because you are going from .png to .svg or something like that, do not forget the redirects. Keep in mind, it will be slow to communicate these changes to Google:

(10) If you host your images on a CDN, hopefully you can redirect as well:

(11) Learn more at:

The funny thing, embedding these tweets like this really probably kill the page speed of this page. But there is a trade off from giving more functionality to page speed.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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