How to maintain seo when updating images that have date structured permalinks?

  • Hello. How can I update/change my website’s images without changing the permalink structure of that image url? To help you understand what I mean, I’ll use an example:

    For one of my portfolio pages I have an image titled “attorney-logo.jpg”. The permalink/url for that particular image would be in the following format: https://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hill-law-logo-design.jpg. Lets say I want to replace that image with a newer one by the same name. When I upload the new image, the url is now: https://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/hill-law-logo-design.jpg. (see the date change?)

    Because the permalink / url being created includes the date of the upload, this results in an entirely new link. Considering I want to change hundreds of images on my portfolio and blog pages, this will result in hundreds of images with new urls, which means that all of the many images that were showing up well in google’s “image search” will be no longer.

    My question is: how do I avoid losing seo on hundreds of my site images? WordPress won’t simply let me change the upload date of new images to older dates. I’m completely confused on what to do here. If you’re wondering why I need to update hundreds of images, it’s because I changed themes and am painstakingly re-doing all of my images so that they fit the theme’s new larger image size area.

    I hope I’ve explained this well enough to understand. I’ve searched and can’t find an answer anywhere. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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  • Hello needforname,

    I hope that I understand your question correctly. Form what I gathered you would like to replace an image with an updated one and use the same permalink? If that is the case you can do this by means of FTP. You can use a program like FileZilla, and then connect to your site. (You may need login credentials for FTP from your host if you haven’t done this before). Once connected navigate to the folder with the picture you would like to update, in the example you mentioned before go to /wp-content/uploads/2011/11/. Once there replace the image hill-law-logo-design.jpg with the new one.

    I am not sure if this will effect your images in Google Image Search, however it will replace the image on your website without having to change anything.

    Hope that helps and solves your problem.

    Thread Starter needforname

    (@needforname)

    Hey dschafer28… thanks for the suggestion, I really appreciate that. Not sure why I didn’t think of that, but it makes sense. I’ll give it a try. Thanks again!

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