Rename Images or Not - effect on ranking in image search?

[bobbarnes]

I have an old established site that I am in the process of upgrading. It relies heavily on images (taken by me) and as part of the revamp I have made quite a bit of improvement to these. When the site was originally constructed I knew next to nothing about re-touching and as such they were literally just cropped to size and look rather drab.

Every single image has been revisited and given a new name so that there is no danger of accidental overwriting of the live site versions. When it comes to site switchover day it would seem that I have 3 options:

1. Remove all the existing images from the live image directory and go with the new images.
2. Leave the existing images in the live image directory and add the new versions.
3. Rename the new images on to match the corresponding originals.

Being niche images many rank very well in G Images and I can’t decide whether G would appreciate “fresh” content or would preserve ranking on images of the same name that are clearly “different” images.

Any thoughts?

[aristotle]

On options 1 and 2, you would also have to change the source code for the pages.

For option 3, you could simply upload the new images to replace the old ones. You wouldn't have to change any source code, so Google wouldn't see difference.

[HuskyPup]

Any thoughts?

I have thousands of images, many in Coppermine galleries but all the rest in hand-constructed niche widget sites. Over the years I have not touched the Coppermine galleries even though I know I could tweak them a bit more however the hand-built sites I have tweaked as new SEOing techniques came to light or just for the hell of trying a crazy idea out.

I have also replaced images as and when I found better ones to display. My experience has been that the better I got the better their ranking became to the point where, more or less, all my images are #1 for my widget trade.

Based upon the above I would go with replacing and re-seoing/optimising your existing images since G already knows them and will reassess them accordingly, it is much more difficult these days to get new image pages to rank in a competitive sector, that's if your sector is competitive.

You may find this post helpful # 3963173:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[bobbarnes]

Thanks for the quick replies.

The site is small and composed of static html. As it stands the re-designed version has been built out under a temp directory tree and is almost ready to copy into the live tree (just finished checking the meta tags).
So there are no code changes required to use the new images and these are all complete - not that I mind going through and changing the names.

HuskyPup - To be 100% clear, your experience indicates that it would probably be worth using the original names for the enhanced images and let G work out that they've been altered?