301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
-
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out?
Appreciate your views!
-
Hi Peter,
Don't really understand your question about permalink & url - as far as I know a permalink is just an url which remains permanent. Could you give an example of what you mean?
GWT is checking if pages exist - it's not showing you errors if only a part of the page (like the image is missing) - Screaming Frog is much better to help you with this. If Screaming Frog is detecting the issues, it implies that there are links to these images. When you go to the "Response Code" tab - filter on 4xx errors and click on the image url - you can see in the window below under "inlinks" which pages are linking to this image.
Dirk
-
Thank you Dirk.
Just wondering if there is an actual difference between a URL and a Permalink? If there is a difference, and an image is just a URL, would it return a 404 if there is no link (internal or external) to any of the pictures?
Moz detected 404's, ScreamingFrog detected the 404's for some (old) pictures on the current site. GWC does not mention anything on 404s on any pictures.
-
Peter,
It depends.
If you don't get a lot of traffic from image search there is no need to do anything special.
If you are receiving a lot of traffic you basically have two options
-
redirect the images to the new location (if this is easy to do)
-
alternative would be to keep the images in the old location & put them in the new location as well. As you update the sitemap & redirect the url's Google will after a while update the index for image search & get the new location. As long the index is not updated, your 'old' images will still appear in image seach, when people click on the link they will however be redirected to your new page (as the page containing them is redirected). In my experience - the update frequency of the image index is lower than the normal search index.
I applied this strategy on 2 migrations of sites with 90% of search traffic = image & it proofed quite successful.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have additional questions,
rgds,
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
-
Should I do multiple 301 redirects?
We launched our website less than a year ago. We had another domain name and business name. I created 301s from the old domain to the new domain, that are still in place now. We are in the process of restructuring our current site which would result in pages getting a new title and URL to match. Essentially it would look something like this:
Web Design | | MAVENTRI
-- olddomain.com/page1 --> newdomain.com/page1 --> newdomain.com/newpage I recently checked the analytics and it looks like we are still getting traffic redirected from the old domain. What is the best way to handle these redirects? Should I redirect a redirect?0 -
We mapped 301's, uploaded htacces, submitted sitemap and still TANKED after redesign?
Hi All, We had some great rankings on store.jrdunn.com since 2006 and we switched to just http://jrdunn.com with cleaner url structures about 13 days ago. We were on Volusion now Magento. We mapped out a couple of thousand of 301's and carefully choose very similar landing pages on the new site. Uploaded an htcaccess file and submitted sitemap in GWT. We have been correcting 404's and watching GWT like a hawk. We dropped on several almost all of our great terms from page one to page 14 or 15 on the new site. We don't even rank yet on our own brand terms ?!?. ORGANIC traffic has dropped more than 50%. The only thing in our plan that we couldn't execute was using the "we moved" tool in GWT because they don't allow switches from subdomains to be entered. Bummer! Do you think missing that one thing caused the plummet? In retrospect perhaps we changed too many things at once ie hosting, cms and going down to root url. Anyways, I don't know what we can do from here but we'd sure be silly not to ask! Anybody's suggestions or past experiences with this situation would be huge! Thanks so much in advance, Sean
Web Design | | seandunn0 -
Is it worth keeping .html even if 301'ing
We're going from static to a wordpress based ecommerce site. While we can append .html to urls the directory structure will change so that www.oursite.com/productname.html goes to www.oursite.com/product/productname.html My question is: Is it worth the trouble (from an seo perspective) of using a plugin to append new urls with .html when we're going to have to use 301 redirects anyway? If not should the urls have a trailing slash?
Web Design | | jbk3650 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
E-commerce Site Layout
I have got an e-commerce site already and i am thinking of staring a new e-commerce site with new domain, but i will keep the layout and design same. Products would be similar to what i sell on my other ecommerce site Will Google Penalise me of having same layout and same design or is it ok to open multiple ecommerce sites with same layouts
Web Design | | usef4u0 -
What is value in site aggregation?
If one was to own 5 sites that were in a similar vertical and at some point decide that managing 5 sites was more of a pain than managing 1,2, or 3, is it possible to combine sites via 301 redirects and increase the overall DA, and for urls that are similar, PA? So, we have site Hairbrush.com, comb.info, trimmer.com, hairmud.org, and barber.net: Assuming that they have a DA of Hairbrush.com = 32 Comb.info = 36 Trimmer.com = 27 Hairmud.org = 21 Barber.net = 44 Is there any testing that has shown combining the first 4 would increase the Comb.info from DA of 36 to DA of 51, etc? Is there any testing regarding the same, but with Page Authority? Thanks PS Assume other variables are equal. I also realize this could look as if they were all ECommerce, but what if they were service or bricks and mortar?
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Can SEO Moz perform a full site crawl and provide a report showing all URLs within an existing domain?
We are conducting a site redesign and need to get an idea of all pages that are out there on our domain (in some report fashion). This would help for discovery and cleanup as we re-work the site and move to a new CMS. Thanks
Web Design | | DCondon0 -
Redirecting 301 Redirects -- Will Search Engines Notice?
Hello Mozzers, We're currently evaluating a client site where the previous web developer redesigned the site and got lazy, 301 redirecting hundreds of pages to the home page instead of to their respective new URLs. Ugh. In any case, we will probably fix this for the sake of implementing best practices. But I am curious how search engines treat 301'd URLs, as they are supposed to be permanent redirects. Will search crawlers ever visit the old URLs again to find that we've re-redirected them? Or have they written them off as moved to the home page for good, meaning that there's no way to direct the authority of the previous URLs to their rightful targets? Thanks!
Web Design | | SEOTeamSF0