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.
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows:- (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg
- (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg - (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg
When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons).
So my questions for recovery are:
- Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else?
- Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.?
Thanks in advance for your advice.
-
Sorry I missed this follow-up earlier. Within the site map you'll want to change the http://WWW to http://CDN for these image files. The www version of your site, and the cdn server are on two different IPs / server. You want images to be serving from the CDN one.
For 2, if you do use 301 redirection I'd recommend scripting it so that the script inspects whether or not it's an image file and then applies the cdn change. A pro in your area that works with REgex and htaccess will be able to guide you through that.
The username.net-dns.com thing... That's not your server is it? You can't apply redirects on servers outside of your control. Cheers!
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your answer - Sorry I didn't mean about the URL for the location of the sitemap - I think my question wasn't clear - may I rephrase it:(1) Inside my image sitemap, the urls serve off the www. subdomain as bolded in the example below (not .cdn). I'm assuming this setup is correct as this was auto-generated by an Image Sitemap Generator - does the below image:loc look correct to you?
<url><loc>http://www.bosphorusyacht.com/yachts/</loc>
image:imageimage:lochttp://**WWW.**bosphorusyacht.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/istanbul-boat-rental.jpg</image:loc></image:image></url>(2) For a 301 image redirect would I set it up like this:
Redirect 301 /wp-content/uploads/2010/09/istanbul-boat-rental.jpg
http://**WWW.**bosphorusyacht.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/istanbul-boat-rental.jpgOR
Redirect 301 /wp-content/uploads/2010/09/istanbul-boat-rental.jpg
http://**CDN.**bosphorusyacht.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/istanbul-boat-rental.jpgOR
How would I 301 this one?: username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg
Hope you can advise one last time - thank you!
-
Right. Not everything is going to be served from cdn. It's most likely setup for your images so your sitemap will still reside on www. Make sure to point to the front end files though as those are the publicly accessible ones.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your reply and advice. I've read the guidelines and will follow those. But I wonder if you can clarify an issue on implementing them that is not answered there:On my site the images in 'Backend' (edit/admin/code view) start with WWW.mydomain... and in 'Frontend' (actual published view in browser) they start with CDN.mydomain...
So my question is, do I use the Backend or Frontend (www. or cdn.) for the URL in both image sitemaps and in 301 redirect final destination?
My current sitemap for example seems to be using www rather than cdn. : http://www.bosphorusyacht.com/sitemap-image.xml
Thanks for your help!
-
You're on it. Redirecting to the new image source and submitting a new sitemap pointing to the URL 3 location for your images will be big steps in the right direction. Be sure to follow the instructions here for your sitemap: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636 as well as reviewing image publishing guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016. Cheers!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Should I avoid duplicate url keywords?
I'm curious to know Can having a keyword repeat in the URL cause any penalties ? For example xyzroofing.com xyzroofing.com/commercial-roofing xyzroofing.com/roofing-repairs My competitors with the highest rankings seem to be doing it without any trouble but I'm wondering if there is a better way. Also One of the problems I've noticed is that my /commercial-roofing page outranks my homepage for both residential and commercial search inquiries. How can this be straightened out?
Local Website Optimization | | Lyontups0 -
Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords
We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)
Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto0 -
Content writing for single entity business (The use of I)
Most of my clients consist of single entity law firms in which my clients repeatedly use the pronoun "I" to describe every service they provide. I have always preferred using the business name The Law Office of..." put lawyer name here". Is it ok to repetitively use the pronoun "I" in the content. To me it feels lack luster and childish not very professional, however I have a hard time convincing the lawyers of this. What are your thoughts? Can good content be written with the repetitive use of "I"? If not is the business name sufficient or maybe another pronoun? I will be showing responses to my clients if that is ok.
Local Website Optimization | | donsilvernail0 -
Should I use pipe in title tags for local seo?
Hi, I've created a bunch of landing pages for local areas, reading, windsor, slough etc for the title tag I have for Windsor Emergency Electrician Windsor - BrandName should I be using a pipe in the tag to further help search engines learn/identify the location? Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName Thank you Kev
Local Website Optimization | | otex1 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Subdomain versus Subfolder for Local SEO
Hello Moz World, I'm wanting to know the best practices for utilizing a subdomain versus a subfolder for multi location businesses, i.e. miami.example.com vs. example.com/miami; I would think that that utilizing the subdomain would make more sense for a national organization with many differing locations, while a subfolder would make more sense for a smaller more nearby locations. I wanted to know if anyone has any a/b examples or when it should go one way or another? Thank you, Kristin Miller
Local Website Optimization | | Red_Spot_Interactive0 -
Same blog, multiple languages. Got SEO concerns.
Hi, My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story. However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority. How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed? Any insight is welcome. Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | Mest0 -
Is translating my SEO meta data to new languages worthwhile?
When translating a website to additional languages, is it recommended, for Google SEO purposes, that the keywords, re-written URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions of each page be translated as well; or have those elements been completely depreciated?
Local Website Optimization | | sptechnologies0