Ask Yoast: How to update images without losing rankings? • Yoast | SEO

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!

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!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Do you have an SEO-related question? A pressing SEO conundrum you can’t find the answer to? Send an email to ask@yoast.com, and your question may be featured in one of our weekly Ask Yoast vlogs.

Note: please check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about the Yoast SEO plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.

Read more: Image SEO: Optimizing images for  search engines »

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