Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. How important is the file extension in the URL for images?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    How important is the file extension in the URL for images?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    11
    10492
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • dsbud
      dsbud last edited by

      I know that descriptive image file names are important for SEO. But how important is it to include .png, .jpg, .gif (or whatever file extension) in the url path? i.e. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever vs. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever.jpg

      Furthermore, since you can set the filename in the Content-Disposition response header, is there any need to include the descriptive filename in the URL path?

      Since I'm pulling most of our images from a database, it'd be much simpler to not care about simulating a filename, and just reference an image id in my templates.

      Example:

      1. Browser requests GET /images/123456
      2. Server responds with image setting both Content-Disposition, and Link (canonical) headers

      Content-Disposition: inline; filename="golden-retriever"
      Link: <https: 123456="" example.com="" images="">; rel="canonical"</https:>

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • willcritchlow
        willcritchlow @dsbud last edited by

        In theory, there should be no difference - the canonical header should mean that Google treats the inclusion of /images/123456 as exactly the same as including /images/golden-retriever.

        It is slightly messier so I think that if it was easy, I'd go down the route of only ever using the /golden-retriever version - but if that's difficult, this is theoretically the same so should be fine.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • dsbud
          dsbud @willcritchlow last edited by

          @Will Thank you so much for this response. Very helpful.

          "If you can't always refer to the image by its keyword-rich filename"...

          If I'm already including the canonical link header on the image, and am able to serve from both /images/123456 and /images/golden-retriever (canonical), is there any benefit to referencing the canonical over the other in my image tags?

          willcritchlow 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • willcritchlow
            willcritchlow last edited by

            Hi James. I've responded with what I believe is a correct answer to MarathonRunner's question. There are a few inaccuracies in your responses to this thread - as pointed out by others below - please can you target your future responses to areas where you are confident that you are correct and helpful? Many thanks.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • willcritchlow
              willcritchlow last edited by

              @MarathonRunner - you are correct in your inline responses - it's totally valid to serve an image (or other filetype) without an extension, with its type identified by the Content-Type. Sorry that you've had a less-than-helpful experience here so far.

              To answer your original questions:

              1. From an SEO perspective, there is no need that I know of for your images to have a file extension - the content type should be fine
              2. However - I have no reason to think that a filename in the Content-Disposition header will be recognised as a ranking signal - what you are describing is a rare use-case and I haven't seen any evidence that it would be recognised by the search engines as being the "real" filename

              If you can't always refer to the image by its keyword-rich filename, then could you:

              • Serve it as you propose (though without the Content-Disposition filename)
              • Serve a rel="canonical" link to a keyword-rich filename (https://example.com/images/golden-retriever in your example)
              • Also serve the image on that URL

              This only helps if you are able to serve the image on the /images/golden-retriever path, but need to have it available at /images/123456 for inclusion in your own HTML templates.

              I hope that helps.

              dsbud 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
              • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                If you really did your research you would have noticed the header image is not using an extension.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                • dsbud
                  dsbud last edited by

                  Again, you're mistaken. The Content-Type response header tells the browser what type of file the resource is (mime type). This is _completely different _from the file extension in URL paths.

                  In fact, on the web all the file extensions are faked through the URL path. For example, this page's URL path is:

                  https://moz.com/community/q/how-important-is-the-file-extension-in-the-url-for-images

                  It's not

                  https://moz.com/community/q/how-important-is-the-file-extension-in-the-url-for-images.html

                  How does the browser know the the page is an html doc? Because of the Content-Type response header. The faked "extension" in the URL path, is unnecessary.

                  You can view http response headers for any URL using this tool.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                  • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                    Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brutal-poll-shows-most-people-214647063.html Good luck!

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                    • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                      Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                      Do you need a new keyboard?

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                        Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                        @James Wolff: I'm really hoping you're being sarcastic here. As it's totally fine to serve it without the extension. There are many more ways for a crawler to understand what type a file is. Including what @MarathonRunner is talking about here.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                        • dsbud
                          dsbud last edited by

                          This isn't accurate. File extension (in the url path) is not the same as the **Content-Type **response header. Browsers respect the response header Content-Type over whatever extension I use in the path.

                          Example: try serving a file /golden-retriever.png with a content type of image/jpeg. Your browser will understand the file as a .jpg. If you attempt to save, your browser will correct to golden-retriever.jpg.

                          You can route URLs however you want.

                          Additionally, I'm not aware of any way browsers "leverage cache by content type". Browsers handle cache by the etag/expires header.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          Browse Questions

                          Explore more categories

                          • Moz Tools

                            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                          • SEO Tactics

                            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                          • Community

                            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                          • Digital Marketing

                            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                          • Research & Trends

                            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                          • Support

                            Connect on product support and feature requests.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • kirin44355

                            Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

                            Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
                            https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
                            Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
                            Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
                            Chris Gorski

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
                            0
                          • Gabriele_Layoutweb

                            If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                            If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb
                            0
                          • Brett-S

                            Link juice through URL parameters

                            Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S
                            0
                          • ThomasHarvey

                            Large robots.txt file

                            We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey
                            0
                          • Sam-P

                            Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?

                            Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P
                            0
                          • COEDMediaGroup

                            301 redirect with /? in URL

                            For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup
                            0
                          • LiamPatterson

                            Product URL structure for a marketplace model

                            Hello All. I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them. I have a URL structure question. I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use Products: products/category/product-name Categories: products/category as the structure for product pages. Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in. How we have handled this before is we have used: Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) However we have two issues with this: The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL. As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was: Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not. FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg: listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side Any ideas on this? Many thanks!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamPatterson
                            0
                          • AndrewY

                            Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt

                            Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links.  While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google.  For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do?  Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed.  Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY
                            1

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.