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.
Redirect old image that has backlinks
-
Hi Moz Community!
I'm doing an audit of a website and did a backlink analysis. In the backlink analysis, there is an image that has 66 backlinks but the image doesn't exist on the website anymore (it was on a website that was created in 2011 - 2 web launches ago). I don't believe a 301 redirect will work for an image that doesn't exist anymore.
How would I redirect the image URL (it's WordPress so we have a specific URL that other websites are linking to but get 404 errors) without going to each individual website and requesting they change the URL link?
Any advice or recommendations would be great. Thanks!
-
Hi Brad,
As others have indicated, there's no reason a 301 redirect on a missing image shouldn't work - it's all based on the URL request (not the actual resource served, since the server intercepts the request and forwards it to another URL along with the 301 status code).
I'd second Yaroslav's recommendation on a good WP plug-in for this (Redirection). You should be able to just use the URL string here to set the redirect where you want to point it.
I would also suggest double-checking that these are actual links pointing to the image URL, not embeds of that image on these pages (some tools will pick that up as a link).
Finally, you may want to create a new page that includes a suitable replacement image if one is available, rather than redirecting to the replacement image file URL (bc this way the reclaimed PageRank will flow through to the rest of your site via your navigation).Best,
Mike -
Hi there,
I believe there are a handful of Wordpress plugins which allow you to simply place in a direct URL path so in your instance http://www.site.com/gallery/image/picture.png could be redirected to http://www.site.com.
The main thing to keep in mind is you use a 301 redirect for this process to ensure all link equity is maintained during the process.
A good plugin for doing 301 redirects on wordpress is - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
I hope this helps!
-
As jcnotfound2083 states the ideal is to use a 301 redirect. I am certain it very much will pass authority. Reason being I've seen many black/grey hats check for broken links on NY Times on older articles and should they see a DoFollow to a expired non owned domain, purchase the lease and 301 redirect it to a domain they want authority passed.
When it comes to the NYTimes scenario, I'd Personally make a website and put relevant content on it, giving me the most longevity as to not appear blatantly obvious that I'm manipulating the situation for ranking. In the case of this image, you don't want to just swap it with another one especially if it's annoying and had say for instance the date meshed in with the url extension, which is to much to deal with. This will redirect it to your homepage
Redirect 301 /foldersAnd/ToOldImage/image.jpg /
-
Hi,
A 301 redirect is the most reasonable alternative. I would place an instruction within the .htaccess file like this:
Redirect 301 /[old_folder] new_url_image
-
Hello Brad,
I'm assuming the image used to be on the same domain you're now on, and it leads them to your website 404 page, in that case, I would upload another relevant image with the same filename to my site and do a 301 redirect.
If those backlinks point to an image from the other site which is different from your current site, you might want to make sure these backlinks are quality and relevant to your content before making a domain level 301 redirect.
Hope this answered your question.
Regards,
Joseph Yap
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
-
Thought FRED penalty - Now see new spammy image backlinks what to do?
Hi, So starting about March 9 I started seeing huge losses in ranking for a client. These rankings continue to drop every week since and we changed nothing on the site. At first I thought it must be the FRED update, so we have started rewriting and adding product descriptions to our pages (which is a good thing regardless). I also checked our backlink profile using OSE on MOZ and still saw the few linking root domains we had. Another Odd thing on this is that webmasters tools showed many more domains. So today I bought a subscriptions to ahrefs and instantly saw that on the same timeline (starting March 1 2017) until now, we have literally doubled in inbound links from very spammy type sites. BUT the incoming links are not to content, people seem to be ripping off our images. So my question is, do spammy inbound image links count against us the same as if someone linked actual written content or non image urls? Is FRED something I should still be looking into? Should i disavow a list of inbound image links? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy0 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Best way to noindex an image?
Hi all, A client wanted a few pages noindexed, which was no problem using the meta robots noindex tag. However they now want associated images removed, some of which still appear on pages that they still want indexed. I added the images to their robots.txt file a few weeks ago (probably over a month ago actually) but they're all still showing when you do an image search. What's the best way to noindex them for good, and how do I go about implementing it? Many thanks, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviephil0 -
What should be done with old news articles?
Hello, We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-nameMy question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1