Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-26339491-20200225001445

A note on why this change doesn't, in fact, negatively affect image rankings:

Image search does not index based on the file page URL; it indexes the image file (.jpg .png, etc.) So if the image is reachable (and it is), it will be discovered and indexed. Ranking is based on the page content. The article page is a significant improvement over a file page in the ranking value for our images because they give context. Google can't "read" images and thus relies on the context around the image as well as file names and meta data. The vast majority of file pages on Fandom do not give that context, while the article pages where images are embedded generally do much better at this.