WordPress image urls - need a WP maven

[RobertFisher]

We were having a conversation re urls that are indexed for images that are stored in various media plugins in WP.

My question for anyone who is an uberWP person is: What is your opinion re best media storage plugins and how these URLs affect pages on a site for ranking, etc.

I realize this is broad, but it is driven out of my concern that I cannot touch everything. When I see a url like this:  http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/img/DB-LOGO-White.png

I know there is no way with all the sites and clients we handle that I can get it perfect but this just bugs me for some reason. Should I just chill since it (seemingly) affects so little....?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Robert,

There are a couple of things to think about. You mention media plugins, but the url you mention just looks like a theme image path. So if we start from theme images, I have got to love the roots wordpress starter theme. It has a series of htaccess rules that basically show all your template images sitting in /media and all your uploaded images sitting in /assets. It does the same thing for css and js files etc, so does a pretty good job of hiding the fact you are using wordpress (at least in terms of url paths). It can be a bit tricky to get used to, but once set up it is pretty good. I don't really think it makes a great difference in ranking for much, but I like the clean urls!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Robert

What do you mean you "can't touch everything"? Do you mean edit the image title, alt text etc?

Looks like you basically have four places images are ending up at the moment;

1. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/Cimy_User_Extra_Fields/ look like user avatars - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/Cimy_User_Extra_Fields/aaron/avatar/Aaron-Cohrs-small.jpg
2. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/ looks like as Lynn was saying theme images such as - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/blog/img/seo-blog.png
3. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/uploads/ which is the default image upload location for WordPress, such as - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Adobe-001.jpg
4. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/ - for "smilies" like http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_razz.gif and there's only two of them

As Lynn said there's not much of a ranking issue here. If this was a gigantic site, I might suggest some sort of crawl optimization.

Also, I generally avoid plugins like the plague unless they offer a real super value add - and in the case of media management the built in WordPress media management is pretty solid for most sites. But it does look like this is the theme determining the location of some of these, not plugins (except for maybe those avatars).

-Dan