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The environment is a classifieds site, where there's products with their description, title and photos and, except for images, all data is stored in a MySQL database.

Although there's friendly titles from classifieds and it's relatively easy to link them, all the images are being saved with random generated name(something like d6as897d6ad67a5s7da8d56sa7d.jpg).

The question here is, for SEO, PAGE RANKING and SERP's purposes, which is the best to do and why?

  • Change image names from random characters to classifieds titles;
  • Create image sitemap;
  • Both.

Which are the cons and pros? And why not choose the other options? Are there other alternatives that I didn't mention here?

EDIT

After a quick search, I found some base64 images in the first results. Since we can't control the names of base64 images and yet they are being indexed, it makes me think that maybe the image names are not directly affecting SEO. Someone can explain this?

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  • Welcome to Webmasters! How long do the ads exist for? Days, weeks, months, years?
    – closetnoc
    Oct 18, 2019 at 14:29
  • Thank you @closetnoc. Forever, their link is like a permalink.
    – yanntinoco
    Oct 18, 2019 at 16:49
  • I do not know if creating an image sitemap will be helpful, however, since these pages will last for a while or more, I would go for an image name that has full semantic meaning. For example, the alt text should be used and the file name should also be used to describe the image. Where this really works well is for image search, however, it can also help to know what the page is about. I do not know what your titles are like, but if they describe the image close enough, that should be fine. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Oct 18, 2019 at 17:27

1 Answer 1

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Both actions: use optimized image names and create image sitemap are recommended in Google image best practices guideline so you should implement both of them.

In addition to that, I'll recommend the following:

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