Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts
-
For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like
Rather than domain.com/images/
We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.
-
Hi Jared,
Webmaster tools is indeed the only way you can check what the % of image search is (you can also see it in Google Analytics if you have linked both accounts - it is the same data however as it's measured via webmaster tools). Solution you put in place seems a very good idea.
rgds
Dirk
-
Dirk,
Thanks for your quality response! Within webmaster tools we get a decent amount of clicks from image search but still less then 10% of our overall organic traffic. Without being able to filter out that the traffic is coming from an image in GA I am not sure how else I can gauge how much organic traffic we are getting from images. We came up with the solution leaving our current images at their location but moving new images to the subdomain. Because much of our inventory changes with new seasonal lines we are adding lots of new products so those images will all be hosted on the sub-domain.
Thanks,
-
Do you get al lot of traffic from image search? If not, I don't think it really matters, there are thousands of site who are using the same setup as you.
if you get a lot of traffic from image search you need to be careful. Never moved from main domain to sub domain, but did a recent migration of a site where 80% of traffic came from image search. All the images were moved to a new folder.
In my experience, the image index is updated much slower than the normal index, and while google is quite fast to index the redirected urls it seems to need much more time for the images. On a previous migration we had the situation where the image thumbnails where still visible, but as soon you did preview the image the image didn't load as it had moved from it's original location. The problem with image search is that when this happened the position of the image remained in the results the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number of sites had stolen our original images).
To avoid this we now migrated the images to the new location and updated the links in the html, but we also kept the same images in the old location until we had the impression that they were no longer indexed.
this strategy seemed to work as unlike the first migration our results from image search were unaffected.
hope this helps
Dirk
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
-
Does Autoplay video effect SEO?
I'm trying to find out if autoplay videos (muted) on the homepage effect seo in anyway? Currently our site ranks around position four on the first page, but we have noticed one competitor we monitor have long auto playing videos on their sites and were wondering if they are a good or bad factor? Any info you would like to share would be great. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | 5TW0 -
Is getting views to an infographic through Imgur beneficial to SEO?
I'm considering posting infographics to Imgur in addition to hosting them on my site in an effort to leverage Reddit a bit more this year. My concern is that, if all goes well, we'll get a ton of views through Reddit to Imgur, maybe a couple clickthroughs to the site, and links to (probably) the Imgur page. I don't see that Imgur gives your profile a followed link, so how would any of this help SEO. I assume it would, because respected guys like John Dougherty espouse the benefits of Reddit, but I can't see how and I need to justify the effort to my department head.
Image & Video Optimization | | MattHolden1 -
Looking to hire an SEO for a Technical Review of my site
Hi I am new to SEO. I am the photographer and blogger behind the photography blog ShootTokyo. I am looking to make sure my site is optimized the best it can be for SEO. My site is a hobby for me but has really grown. I am looking make sure I have best practices implemented. I am not looking for quick fixes or try to cheat the system but to make sure I have a good solid foundation in place for SEO. I don't have a lot of experience nor a lot of free time so I want to make sure whatever free time I spend on this is really productive. I am looking to initially hire someone to do a technical assessment of my site and identify any fundamental issues I should address first. Once I have the assessment I am looking for advice on putting together a work plan on what I need to do and the best way to approach it. How can I best use the tools Moz is offering me? Which things are higher value that I should work on first, specific to my site? For more technical things I might hire this person to implement them or teach me how to implement them. If this is your business can you please let me know what your qualifications, experience, a link to your site and give me a range of what you might charge for something like this (you can email me details if you don't want to post here). If this isn't your business but have a recommendation I would love one. I am Tokyo based so ideally someone either in Asia, Europe or West Coast of US as it makes it easier to connect live if needed. Thanks Dave
Image & Video Optimization | | ShootTokyo0 -
What is the SEO value of images of geographic areas (states, counties, cities) on a page?
We want to put images for specific geographic locations on some new pages we are building and I am wondering if: A) What the SEO value of adding these images would be? B) Suggested Sources for the images. Right now we are looking at using panoramio, but would love some MOZ community advice! Thank you for your help MOZ Community!
Image & Video Optimization | | AlyssaN0 -
Will it help/hinder our local seo by including our local adress on multiple pages?
We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page. We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for. Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original? For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham. All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Image & Video Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
On-page Local SEO
I'm wondering how to pull it off on-page local SEO for a financial institution website with 70 locations. However, they are broken in down in regions, which would make it easier to get our hands around. Would a viable solution be setting up regional pages? I don't know about our CMS capability, but it seems like it would be beneficial to have on each regional page aggregate local-centric press releases (example: a volunteer event or recognition) and local announcements such as paper shred days. Thoughts? Anyone else posed with a similar challenge?
Image & Video Optimization | | SSFCU0 -
Best way to use popular YouTube channel for SEO purposes
Hi all, We have a YouTube channel containing about 25 videos we created professionally a few years ago. They are all product features and are hosted on our site for applicable products (a very small percentage of our overall number of products). This channel was largely forgotten about for a few years. It has now reached over 160k views. What's the best way to utilize these videos for SEO benefits? Any techniques anyone has to maximize our ever increasing number of views? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | bradkrussell0 -
SEO for Explicit / Medical Pictures - Will It Hurt Rankings?
I have a client with page 1 rankings for several keywords. He wants to make some updates to his website. He is offering a new service and wants to show before and after photos of the procedure. He is an OB/GYN, so the before/after pictures are very explicit and have full nudity. How will this affect his rankings? Is there something that I can do to tell Google and other SE's that these photos are medical and not pornographic? Should I host them on another domain? Just looking for thoughts and insight. Thank you in advance!
Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers0