Why are there lots of 404s after setting up CDN?

[stj]

I just setup Cloudfront CDN through W3 Total Cache. Everything looks good but there is one problem that I have encountered:

After activating the CDN none of the images are available at the older image URLs and they are throwing a 404 error.

Let me give you an example for this:

1. Before I setup the CDN, let's say an image was available at http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/leap-of-faith.jpg

2. After I setup the CDN, the image is available at http://cdn.example.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/leap-of-faith.jpg and the good part is the URLs in the blog posts where this image was attached is updated to reflect the above mentioned URL. But the problem is that when visit the older URL of the image (which is what Google has crawled earlier, I get a 404 error).

Can you help me how to avoid this problem?

Ravi C

[DirkC]

Hi,

You could put a 301 redirect of the old image folder to the new location. The easiest alternative is to keep the images in both places for a while, until Google has indexed the new location (which can take a few weeks/months). Normally, if all the internal links have been updated, there should be no links to old location, so these images will disappear from the index and replaced by the ones in the new location. Once they are indexed on their new location, you can delete them in the old location

rgds,

Dirk

[stj]

Thanks for that reply Dirk.

I think what you are referring to is quite applicable when the CDN is setup via using a S3 bucket. I followed the following guide to setup my CloudFront CDN:

https://www.doitwithwp.com/set-up-w3-total-cache-with-amazon-cloudfront-cdn

Here are the 2 problems that I'm facing currently:

1. The images appear at multiple CDN locations - http://cdn5.sarkarilife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/bank-awareness-gk-ibps-bank-exams.jpg as well as http://cdn1.sarkarilife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/bank-awareness-gk-ibps-bank-exams.jpg .

2. The same image is not available at the original location - http://sarkarilife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/bank-awareness-gk-ibps-bank-exams.jpg

Looking forward to your response.

[Mustansar]

I would say you may look at the set up process of CDN may not be as per the required criteria. IF you just check it thoroughly you may be able to get rid of it.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Do you get a lot of traffic coming through image search? Most of the images you use on the site seem to be stock images, so normally the % of image search traffic shouldn't be that big.

If you receive limited or no search traffic from image search, you don't really have to do anything special. There 404 errors in WMT will disappear after a while & the new images will get indexed. Normally the 404's will have no impact on search traffic.

If all CDN's contain all the images, you could always redirect the original image folder to one of the cdn's - but it not strictly necessary.

rgds

Dirk

[stj]

Thanks Dirk.. That sounds good.