Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google?

Thanks

[benesmartin]

Hi there,

The less 301's from external sources the better. The situation with 301's is like this: Page A links to page B but page B is redirected to page C (your page). If you reduce the second step (page B), you won't be losing as much link juice and you will make it easier for crawler as well. Reach out to the webmasters of websites which you have the back links from (pages A) try to convince them to link directly to the page C instead of page B.

Hope it helps. If you have any other questions, let me know. Cheers, Martin

[vtmoz]

Hi Martin,

Here I have question about 301 on my mind for long time. We avoid 301 redirects internally which will not cause page slow loading. What about 301 redirects for the links referred from external sources? I mean page A has been mentioned on a external website which has been redirected to page B?

[benesmartin]

Hi there,

well, with the redirects - you will lose some amount of the link juice but not really a lot (1 - 10%).

However, try to convince the admins of the sites to change URLs to the new ones. It's always better to avoid 301's if you can.

Cheers, Martin

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

You can redirect all images on a new path. It will not hurt you.