It's come up recently at my job that the SEO guys for our customer are unhappy with the src attribute values being generated in our img tags on their CQ/AEM-based website. I know next-to-nothing about SEO, so I won't pretend to understand, but it seems they have a point. We're not using the out-of-the-box image component per se, but the behavior is the same.
The src attribute of the img tags gets the path of the image node, with the img selector and some other stuff appended to it. This of course causes the request to go through the image servlet, which is then responsible for drawing the image. If I understand correctly, it's done this way to support things like the crop/resize/etc tools available in the html5smartimage widget. The servlet applies these edits to the image and renders the altered image.
The complaint is that the actual file name for the images are nowhere to be seen in that src attribute. I'm operating on the assumption that this is a valid complaint, but I really don't know if it is. I'm likely going to be asked to jump through hoops to change this behavior so the src attribute references the image by its direct path in the DAM.
Are these valid complaints? If the complaints are valid, why would the image component work this way? Should the title/alt values be considered sufficient for SEO purposes? If my customer is not using the extra features from html5smartimage, is there any other reason why I should not just address the images by their explicit DAM path? I've already worked out what I think is the best solution, but I'd like to be armed with more information before taking that plunge.
