: Are images with non-standard extensions (such as ".ashx", instead of ".png" or ".jpg") bad for SEO? Certain CMS' running on IIS like Sitecore do not give image files appropriate file formats

@Cofer257

To answer your question: no, it should not pose a problem for SEO.

Why not - given that ashx has nothing to do with images, you ask? Because of the MIME type being sent with the file header.

The .png file ending is actually not what determine what the browser has to interpret, but rather the file headers of the HTTP request. The file headers sent when the browser is requesting an image file of type .png from the CMS, contain the MIME type media/png and the .ashx extension is thus, irrelevant. Same goes for HTML files - they can be called .baumr, as long as the MIME type is text/html. This can easily be set up in both Apache and IIS.

The URL example you have used, is not too common. As you mentioned, in a good setup it should be descriptive, solely for SEO/Image search purposes: /images.ashx?id=picture-of-an-elf

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@Ogunnowo487

Regardless of the "type of" file requested from the server (as would seem to be suggested by the file ".ashx" extension) , the image file format (and corresponding mime-type) received to the client must still be one of png, jpg, gif etc. as otherwise the browser / user-agent will not render/understand it.

So, I don't see how this would affect Google Search.

However, it could affect Image Search for the reasons you mention... none descriptive filename etc. But if the indexing of images is not a concern (and these are perhaps blocked from Googlebot-Image anyway) then I can't see that it is a problem.


...but inform spiders that it is relevant and contextual media related to the text content on the page.


Does Google look at the type/context of the images themselves when determining rank in Google Search?

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