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
-
Image Sitemap - Are You Using One?
We have a lot of nice images and I have been thinking about uploading an image sitemap. If you would care to share your experience with the questions below, I would appreciate hearing what you have learned. Thank you. Have you been using an image sitemap? Do you think that it has brought some benefits to your domain's presence in image search? Did you include thumbnail - size images or only the full size images?
Image & Video Optimization | | EGOL1 -
Image ALt Tag in Sliders and Modules (Banner) in Joomla/Wordpress
Is it possible to do SEO for images in Sliders and Banner modules in Joomla? I would like to add ALT tags and Titles for those, if possible.
Image & Video Optimization | | ArthurRadtke0 -
Local SEO Best Practice
Hi We currently have 6 showrooms in a geographical area (Scotland,UK) and each showroom covers a specific region within the country encompassing towns and cities. So for example showroom A based in Edinburgh covers a customer area of Edinburgh, Fife, St Andrews while showroom B located in Glasgow covers Glasgow, Livingston etc In google places I have drawn the geographical area on the map that each showroom covers making sure that they do not overlap At present some of which are ranking well in local but one is stating that 'google does not support this location' and after following previous advice on the forum this is still the case. Would I be better setting up another google account for this showroom and submit it again into Google Places or would it be better going into Google+ business pages? or are they the same thing? Finally is it worth using the following in Google Places? KML File and Geo Sitemap generation (these files are needed for Google) Address output in Schema.org format
Image & Video Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Does it affect SEO if my "Menu Label" is a shortened form of my "Page Title"?
This might be a very simple question, but I'm just trying to make sure I don't make Google think I'm trying to pull a fast one. For example, my page title would be "Bridal Fashions", but the menu label would be "fashions" to keep the navigation panel simple and streamlined.
Image & Video Optimization | | MassMedia0 -
Off-Page Local SEO for a Home-Based Businesses?
What are some ideas for optimizing for off-page local SEO when you're working with home-based businesses that don't necessarily want to share their physical address, and using a PO box is not an option for major local SEO directories?
Image & Video Optimization | | Inturact0 -
Local SEO, identifying citations
Hello, How do I identify free local citations to target for bobweikel(dot)com I want to rank first for several local results such as nlp boise life coach boise personal coach boise and related terms. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
SEO & Mass-Renaming of Images: Image Name, Alt Text, etc.
We are currently in the process of changing all of our image names and their alt-tags to be descriptive of their content. For instance, changing image names from image0001.jpg to blue-cell-phone-cover. We have hundreds of images on our site, would it be best to rename all of the images and update their tags in one sweeping change or trickle the changes, uploading changed images every other day or so?
Image & Video Optimization | | Buildings0 -
Google Images
Hi, I'm setting up a Barcelona guide as a hobby: barcelonacitybreak.com. Naturally I take care to use good alt-tags, checking Google images I see one of the photos I took listed as number one: "hibernian bookstore barcelona". There is no doubt that this is the photo I took myself, but when I place the mouse over the photo the origin is listed as:http://www.auladirectiva.com/. What is even more worrying though is that when I press the image I automatically download this: "Antispy 2011" from http://protectionxpscannermaster.com! Evidently some kind of "anti-virus" program. How is this possible?
Image & Video Optimization | | vibelingo0