Image Naming for Products - Multiple Images

[theotherandy]

Hello all,
So recently a question came up about image names and SEO. Let's say you had an ecommerce store with many products, and multiple images for each product to show different sides and views. The question is, assuming the alt text for each is unique, is it worth the bother of naming every image for each product with a unique name?

The example would be like this:
silver-spoon.jpg
silver-spoon-right-side.jpg
silver-spoon-left-side.jpg

as opposed to

silver-spoon.jpg
silver-spoon-1.jpg
silver-spoon-2.jpg

I'm thinking that doing this would quickly become a nightmare to manage, while returning almost no value in terms of SEO. Thoughts?

[Wilburforce]

Descriptive image names make it easier to manage images if - as I do - you do a lot of editing in html. I don't think it will make a scrap of difference to ranking.

In both your examples I assume the key-term would be silver spoon anyway, but if everything else is OK you could call them image001/002/003 for all the SEO difference it is likely to make to the page position.

It will make more of a difference if you want them to rank in Image Search (see [support.google.com ]), but I wouldn't personally lose any sleep over it either way.

[RedBar]

Thoughts?

I have thousands of my widget images and I could point you to the de facto post here on how to do it correctly HOWEVER in the last few years Google has managed to screw-up its image search royally. Sometimes I look at their results and wonder WTF is going on when an image bears no relationship whatsoever to the query.

I have seen stolen images of mine ranking at #1 when there is not one mention of the image product name anywhere in the code and I mean nowhere whatsoever.

Having written that for new images I still do everything correctly with the hope that one day a search engine will come along and recognise that keyword1keyword2keyword3.jpg plus alt, plus title, plus correct page url, plus etc. is a far superior result to solely 1234567890.jpg with nothing else.

Ok, the price of bacon is going up, pigs can fly:-)

[RedBar]

By the way I forgot to mention that do not expect to get a huge amount of traffic from Google for images these days. Most image specialists will tell you that they lost 80-85% of their image traffic when Google made their image grab a couple of years ago!