Hello,
This question was already asked, but 4 years ago, so I’m hoping this was solved in the meantime. I uploaded images on my website before, without renaming them. And now that I want to have an SEO optimized naming, when I re-upload my image, nothing change online. Do you know if there is a way to update this ? Or a plugin I can use ?
Thanks in advance,
Nicolas
Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)
Images are cloud-based so even if you work you image name, like ocean.jpg, it will be transformed to something like sdfbf2dx45gv6d863xdv72d1ccf1-ocean.jpg and you can’t do anything about it.
This said, I have checked many many times with SEO experts, and they really don’t care about cloud-based images: they don’t care where the image is hosted (it’s not on the site’s domain) and they don’t care about the name being made mostly of gibberish. So I am not sure that “SEO optimized naming” is a thing at all.
@nmorin - In order for the file to be replaced, the size needs to be different. So you could simply make a quick optimization to the asset, then upload it again. Renaming won’t change the same asset on the CDN. After uploading a new “version”, you have to swap images in the designer since there is no replace function.
As for SEO and Images in general there is a very informative resource Google provides which is “Google Images best practices”, as an SEO practitioner it’s worth memorizing.
Google Images SEO Best Practices | Search Central | Google Developers
In response to a question about SEO and images (11/07/2012) titled " What should filenames and URLs of images contain for SEO benefit?, Google’s John Mueller said
" From our (Google’s) point of view, you can use whatever file names & URL structure that makes sense for your site – you definitely do not need to fine-tune it on this level for SEO purposes. For Image Search, we recommend using descriptive file names, but even if it’s just a number (for example, when a photographer uploads files without modifying the file name the camera used), we can usually work with that just fine - we use a lot of signals to pick up information about an image."
Here is a timely article that is worth a read by Anna Crow. Anna is the Assistant Editor for Search Engine Journal and Head of Content at Leadfeeder. Over the last 10+ years, Anna has successfully been running her own SEO and content agency working with brands like Moz, Kissmetrics, Dollar Thrifty Rental, Hearst Magazine, Mailboat Records, Philip Morris International, Bloomin’ Brands, & many more.
11 Important Image SEO Tips You Need to Know (searchenginejournal.com)
My personal SEO experience shows that using folder names in paths (relevant) that group images into categories helps for Image SEO and since images are often linked, and this benefits the site and image search traffic.
File names can be very important. As a photographer I always include my name in image files since EXIF info can be stripped out. When doing product catalogs good file naming has been huge for SEO / traffic from image search. Basically as a site owner you have to take advantage of everything you can.
Good news is in Google Image Search , images on the CDN are correctly attributed to the site they were crawled from including both domain and the page.
I don’t really care about the numbers and letters in front of the name, it’s just that I can’t change the name at all. For example I uploaded a photo called test_home_page.jpg, and so online it’s something like 743irgbz7483920Rnfnzc-test_home_page.jpg, and I just want to change the last part (test_home_page) to something more professional, and that is close to the purpose of the website. Even though it’s not a huge subject for SEO, it still is cleaner.
@nmorin - you can’t rename assets (on the cdn) but you can add a new one then swap it in the designer. The trick is to modify the file itself (size) so that it is different from the one already present otherwise it will not be uploaded since it is a duplicate. Name has nothing to do with how Webflow handles this. I usually change the compression in an image editor and save local with the new name, then upload that. After you replace the asset where it is used in the designer you can then flag the old file for deletion (but that can take quite some time to actually happen.
It’s a weird trick but if you deleted all your images from the asset panel, publish and refresh the page, only used images are kept, all unused images should vanish. I know, scary 
