How to update images without losing rankings?
Updating ‘big’ things on your site can have quite an impact. You may well be facing (slightly) lower rankings or traffic for a while after changing things like your URL structure, or switching to a different TLD, for example. Sometimes, there’s little you can do to avoid that, other than properly implementing the changes and redirecting when necessary.
So, how about when you update and improve images on your site? Especially if some of your images are ranking well, you want to avoid losing those positions when updating images. How do you do that? You’ll find the answer in today’s Ask Yoast!
Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about image SEO and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!
Bryan Fly sent us his question about updating images:
We want to make some improvements to the images on our site. The last time we did that we lost a lot of image rankings. My question is how do we update our images without losing organic positions on them?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Updating images without losing rankings
“Well, Bryan, if you change them on the spot so you keep the same URL and you don’t change anything around them, you really shouldn’t be losing image rankings.
If you change anything around them, then Google has to index all of that and that will take a lot of time. So keep the same URLs, it’s basically the suggestion. Good luck!”
Read more: Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines »
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This is really interesting for me. I didn’t think this before. I will use this so that I don’t lose ranking now. Thanks
very nice post thanks for sharing with us. very helpful post
Happy we could help!
I Really love yoast, i use it for all my site. I found something weird, for some reason my image gradually lost ranking also my web to. My site backlink profile better than competitor but after 5 years my image and site losing ranking, that it is normal?
Hi Rak! It’s very difficult to say what happened without really diving into it. It could be all kind of things and rankings always change a bit… If it happened this week perhaps it’s related to this Google update? https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-broad-search-algorithm-update-is-rolling-out-302982
Great post you had shared here.
Keep up updating us.
Thank you so much for sharing great tips with us about SEO . Keep it up continue. I love to reading these types of posting..
You’re welcome, Sofia! Glad you love it :)
On point, Thanks for the answer Sir Joost! I do have a related question, Google is not indexing all my images, for example I have 18,460 submitted and only 3,061 are indexed.
Hi Mircea, Thanks for your question! There’s not always a clear reason for this, as you can read here: https://yoast.com/help/images-in-the-xml-sitemap/ but generally it’s not really something to worry about. Good luck!