Importance of images?

[rrw]

This may be a very stupid question, but thought I'd ask--so be kind :)

We have quite a few photos in our file manager for products that we no longer carry. I started deleting these the other day, then it dawned on me that since they are named using our primary keywords they may be helping with search engine rankings (ie: wedding_widget.jpg). Is this true? Does anyone know if the photos that are stored on our site but not actually live can help or hurt SEO?

[mondo]

If there's no links anywhere to the photos I don't believe the spiders can pick them up

[Mark]

Google has a category just for images. Check to see if yours show up in there for your keywords

[3dCartRobb]

If there's no links anywhere to the photos I don't believe the spiders can pick them up

Mondo speaks the truth. Image links don't show up in regular google searches because thats irrelevant. Chekc google images though.

Honestly though, you'd be better off leaving the products in the cart and choosing to display it as out of stock or discontinued. It would still be spidered and you never know if someone will find it, come to your site, and then buy something else.

[customtshirts]

Images are important when we talk about the images for the SEO purpose. But huge images can slow down the loading speed of your web pages. Google is going to penalize the web pages having the low loading speed.

[rrw]

The pictures that I'm referring to are not shown on our site--they just sit in our file manager. There are far too many products to list them anyway and show them as "discontinued". So if I'm reading correctly, I could delete them without any problems.

[mondo]

That's what we do.