If you have images on your website that are likely to change (e.g. have a different watermark), but the same image name, should you add version information to the end of the image name, or would this be bad for SEO purposes?I have an issue where we have changed the watermark on a number of images 5 months ago, but Google Image search still shows the old watermark on the images. So I am assuming that Google hasn't downloaded the new images as the filenames are the same as the old ones.
Should you add version information to images on your website?
web development;images;google;seo
There's a bit of interpretation necessary, but if the modifications make the image qualitatively different enough for you to be asking this question, then it arguably isn't bad to version the filenames in some way, which then makes it actually a different image. You obviously see it as important that the new image/version get picked up, which implies that the previous one isn't what you want showing in results and so on. Moving beyond Google a bit, it's worth noting that some CDNs also let you attach query strings to links, image references, etc. to indicate that something's been updated.