Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images

    Technical SEO
    4
    4
    13284
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Natitude
      Natitude Subscriber last edited by

      We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA.

      My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • MoosaHemani
        MoosaHemani Banned @brad.s.knutson last edited by

        I guess in order to transfer the link juice of one particular page to another particular page page level redirect is a good idea!

        redirecting images URL is not really a good idea unless you have insanely great links on your image URL page and you really want to transfer the URLs link juice to the same image on other website (not really a case of the real world!)

        If Link Juice is something you don't care about, go for a domain level redirect as i am getting a feeling that both website have similar structure and if you want to properly transfer the link juice from one URL to the similar URl of another website, try page level redirect!

        Remember, Try to reduce the number of 301 redirection as this might increase the page load time which has a negative impact on SERP rankings.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • brad.s.knutson
          brad.s.knutson last edited by

          If the structure is identical (I'm not clear on that from your post) then why not do a global redirect from the old content to the new content

          RewriteEngine On
          RewriteBase /
          RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
          RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

          This should redirect old pages to the same structure on the new domain, including images.

          MoosaHemani 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • MartijnMartijn
            MartijnMartijn last edited by

            Redirecting images to a page is not a common practice, also this will result in weird situations.

            For example: 
            An user searches your product on images.google.com and would like to show the original image. This will cause a redirect to your product page instead of the image.

            Redirect images to images if you would like to have the images of the "new" website indexed by Google instead of the old ones. You could check Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics whether Google is responding to your signals.

            You can also take a look at the Change of Address functionality in Google Webmaster Tools which allows you to update the Google index of SiteABC to SiteXYZ for next 180 days. After that period Google will probably know the new situation.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • moz46y

              Reusing an already 301 redirected URL for a very important keyword

              301 redirect 301 redirects

              I have a question about reusing an already 301 redirected URL Till now I never reused an URLs that has been already redirected with a 301 redirect. However, I just started working on a website where in past they created a lot of 301 redirects without thinking about the future, and now certain URLs, that are currently redirected with a 301, would be very useful (exact match) and needed (for some of the most important keywords for this specific business), to maintain an optimal, homogeneous and "beautiful" URL structure. Has any of you ever reused a URL that was previously redirected with a 301 redirect? If yes what are your experiences with it? Can content on the reused URL (that was previously 301 redirected and than the redirect removed) normally rank if the page is reestablished and the redirect is removed (and you do great content, on page, internal linking, backlinking, .... ) or is such an URL risky / not recommended / "burned" forever and not recommended to be reused again... especially for very important keywords since it present the exact match ?! Thank you very much for all your help! Regards

              Technical SEO | | moz46y
              0
            • LindsayE

              What to do with old content after 301 redirect

              I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?

              Technical SEO | | LindsayE
              0
            • Squall315

              Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

              Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

              Technical SEO | | Squall315
              0
            • dballari

              Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?

              Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David

              Technical SEO | | dballari
              0
            • Kotkov

              302 or 301 redirect to https ?

              I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
              RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance

              Technical SEO | | Kotkov
              0
            • TrevorMcKendrick

              301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match

              My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!

              Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick
              0
            • BaseKit

              How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?

              Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris

              Technical SEO | | BaseKit
              0
            • Artience

              301 Redirect & Cloaking

              HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.

              Technical SEO | | Artience
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.