Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images

[Natitude]

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?

[MoosaHemani]

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.

[brad.s.knutson]

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.

[MartijnMartijn]

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.