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
-
Negative SEO with Google Images
We have a client in the heavy equipment industry that is trying to "push down" images in a Google image search that are associated with an accident over ten years ago. This client has launched a new website, and we have applied the best practices of on-page SEO (page titles, unique meta-descriptions, alt-image tags, focused keyword targeting, etc.). The challenge we have is with Google Image results. It seems the image results shown in the Google Image search rankings are often not inline with how images have been labeled in the alt-tag section. I have checked these images with the Moz Chrome extension, and I have often found the way the image is labeled in the alt-tag is not related to the search query made within the Google image search bar. I certainly may not be factoring in other weighted items when it comes to how images are ranked. Are there other ranking factors associated with Google Image results outside of the Alt-Image Tag? If so, what are those factors? Our ultimate goal is to provide a strategy that would allow us to tag images within this specific sector that are relevant to this specific heavy equipment product, and at the same time, "push down" the rankings of the images that have a negative association to them. We certainly want to take the right approach here, and want to earn these rankings. However, the way Google ranks images seems to be a mystery of sorts. Is there a specific strategy relevant to Google Image rankings that would fall inline with the challenge listed above? I appreciate any advice on this topic. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | JaredBroussard0 -
Local Seo for Two Offices?
What is the best way to go about doing local seo for two offices? Everything I can research on local seo provides awesome information...if you have one office, but we have two: one is in downtown Tampa and the other in a northern suburb. Anyone have experience with this that they'd like to share? I'd appreciate it. Happy Friday! Ruben
Image & Video Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Video SEO, should I do what Roger does?
As per http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo I want to rank with a rich snippet and improve my domain's overall ranking. So I am going to ignore YouTube and use Vimeo Pro (using old embed code). I will also submit a video XML sitemap and implement schema markup. Gotcha. Now let's check this strategy with what SEOmoz is doing. Let's take 5 Steps to Facebook Advertising - Whiteboard Friday it was uploaded onto the SEOmoz blog on 29 March 2013. Then on 4 April 2013 it was uploaded onto YouTube. As at 7 April 2013 (PST) I am not seeing the latest SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday Evolution of the Local Algorithm - Whiteboard Friday posted on YouTube. SEOmoz blog has a person written transcription, YouTube has an automatic transcript. There is a link to the SEOmoz comments below the YouTube Video. Cricky! They've gone all YouTube. Stop the boat. Or should I? My assumption is that SEOmoz is big enough so that it is willing to risk losing a few links to their YouTube webpages. Indeed they delay posting the video on YouTube for a week after it has been posted on the SEOmoz blog. What's more it ensures that there is a very good transcript on their blog. Top that off with comments (and I assume video sitemap and schema) and it is happy it will gain more from the traffic generated from the YouTube community than the potential loss of links to its domain, forgoing potential domain authority increases and resulting traffic. So Roger, I'm a little boat not a SEOmoz battleship cruiser, should I do what you do and wait for a week before I put my videos on YouTube? Or avoid the dangerous currents of YouTube stealing my domain authority and ignore YouTube all together?
Image & Video Optimization | | BruceMcG0 -
Why Google doesn't want to show our images?
Our website http://www.fiberscope.net has a good positions in search for the most of important keywords, but for some reason store's images are not visible in search results. All images have ALT attributes but represented in Google Images very poor. Any ideas and suggestions regarding this issue?
Image & Video Optimization | | Meditinc.com0 -
Question about Wistia and possible other Video Solutions for better SEO?
We are considering using Wistia as a more SEO-friendly video solution. In our preliminary tests, we like what we see with the exception of one thing. There is no way for video users to toggle the interactive transcripts on and off. From an aesthetic viewpoint, our team finds the scrolling text extremely visually distracting. For usability and SEO purposes, we know that having the transcript there is important. Unfortunately in the embed codes, you are limited to either including the interactive transcript, or leaving it out. There is no mechanism to allow users to view it if they want to, but leave it off if they don.t Has anyone here created a workaround for this problem or found another solution, like Wistia, that has a more aethetically pleasing and user-friendly presentation of trascripts/captions? Thanks! Dana
Image & Video Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Google images indexing on no-index html page?
Hi, I wonder if a image can get indexed, included in google images if it is located on a html page with a no-follow tag? Thanks for your help.
Image & Video Optimization | | wildnis0 -
What is the best way to internally link via images?
What is the best way to internally link via images? I have a website about shoes with all different brands. Let's say I'm trying to rank for "ABC sandals", and on the ABC page I have a "related brands" section with 4 logos of related sandal brands, linking to their respective page. Currently the alt text of the logos is "XYZ Logo" with the link title text "XYZ." Would it be beneficial to have change either the image alt text, or the link title text, or both to "XYZ sandals"?
Image & Video Optimization | | Hakkasan0 -
Outsourcing SEO
I have decided to give my website a boost by outsourcing some of my SEO. Especially looking for building quality backlinks and help with Google Places. Any good recommendations?
Image & Video Optimization | | PMC-3120870