How to name my images
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Craft unique images for every image you have, it will only benefit you.
Blue narrow lot home in Portland
Restored narrow lot home in Nashville
Cozy narrow lot home in...
Spacious narrow lot home...
recently painted narrow lot home..
narrow lot home restored kitchen
Think of what makes that home unique and add that to the file name.
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Hello Paul,
The short answer to your question is that Googlebot can only really identify what an image is by the descriptor you give it (I assume you know this already) and will give greater benefits to a picture that presents an image which is identified as being relevant to the keywords you are attempting to rank for.
Duplicate content in this case probably means that you have a number of images with similar names which can be seen as "spammy" in the same way that keyword loading was done years ago. If you are able to provide localized descriptors for each image (i.e. narrow lot home "location"), and separate the images based on location or subject (single-storey narrow lot home, two storey narrow lot home, etc.) you will be off to a good start. This is particularly true if you are operating in a local context - on a national or international scale this might be a bit problematic as there are many cities and towns around the world that share similar names.
If you are providing multiple images for a single home, such as a listing, I would place the descriptor for 1 or 2 images on the site and leave the rest to avoid duplication. As long as there is sufficient content filling the areas around the images (and users seem to be getting what they want out of the page), I don't see this being a huge factor in your ranking ability. Remember that as well as "hard ranking factors" (algorithms), there are also "soft ranking factors" such as user experience and metrics. These are all taken into account in these situations, and you just have to do your best not to come across too spammy in order to reap the benefits of the system.
Hope this helps!
Rob
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Hey Stephen... Ray and Rob make some great points here!
Here is my personal explanation on the importance of proper image alt attributes... my mother lost her eyesight back when she was young. As she uses her computer each day, knowing my profession, she constantly tells me how bad most of the sites are that she visits. The reason she feels they are so bad is due to improper structure and poor usage of image alt tags. When her computer reads the contents of a web page to her, it reads similar to the way a web crawler would. Images are a very important factor and the alt attributes should be a clear explanation of the image itself. Thus explaining what the image is to both a web crawler and most important, your visitors.
I would recommend catering your website, its design, content and the optimization (including images) to your users first. End of the day, without them, does being on top of Google even matter that much? Good luck with your project!! Cheers
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