Redirecting Images

[Tinhat]

Hi,

I'm wondering how important it is when relaunching a site on a new platform (switching to Drupal) to serve up images from the same file paths in order to ensure consistency during the changeover.

I've tried to keep the questions straightforward so that this post can be useful to people in a similar situation in future:

1. How much difference do the file paths make to SEO?
2. Does Google care or even notice if the image file paths change?
3. Is it worth forcing Drupal to mimic our old file paths for the sake of consistency with the old site in order to maintain rankings OR do we take the opportunity to redesign our file paths for better SEO?

Any help would be much appreciated

[Andy_Morley_TWDG]

In my opinion the only reason you would want to keep the file paths the same for the images on your pages is if you are actively seeking to gain (or retain) traffic from Google Image search....

I cant see any other reason to keep them, as i understand it the URL is only important for the page.. not the elements on it.

eg... www.somesite.co.uk/directory/page.html

[Tinhat]

Thanks Andy.

We don't really get enough "images.google" traffic to justify the effort needed to rejig everything for that reason alone.

However, that does raise a secondary question of whether we should be improving our image search SEO. Do image search rankings contribute to regular search rankings?

Does anyone think it would be worth redirecting the old image file paths to the new ones instead? I can't think of many cases (if any) where it would be necessary to have these redirects but I know that in the process of past migrations my predecessors have done this.