301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?

[Discountvc]

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!

[DirkC]

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

[Discountvc]

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.

[DirkC]

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