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
-
Image Audit: Getting a list of *ALL* Images on a Site?
Hello! We are doing an image optimization audit, and are therefore trying to find a way to get a list of all images on a site. Screaming Frog seems like a great place to start (as per this helpful article: https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-perform-an-image-optimization-audit), but unfortunately, it doesn't include images in CSS. 😞 Does the community have any ideas for how we try to otherwise get list of images? Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
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 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Redirect at Registrar or Server
Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0