How do we preserve images in google search after CMS migration?

[tomnivore]

Hi Folks

we are about to migrate to a new CMS (bigcommerce/volusion type of thing) are are advised that we will preserve our google love for our old URLS with 301 re-directs. OK

but what about images that show in search

(we have a lot of our images show up high in relevant google image search)

will this method work the same or should we do something else to keep the image benefits?

many thanks

Tom

[DirkC]

Tom,

Image search is a bit different - if you are dependant on image search & the names and/or location of the images is changing during migration you have to very careful. (as I am a bit lazy, I just repeat the answer I posted here)

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 in the search results , 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 but the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number of sites who 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.

Apart from that, you will have off course have to update the image sitemap as well (if you currently have one)

If you have additional questions, don't hesitate to ask them (I migrated 3 sites over the last year which had 90% of the traffic coming from image search)

rgds

Dirk

[LesleyPaone]

I don't think your suggestion will work. Both of the platforms he mentioned are hosted, normally with hosted platforms you get very limited file access. I think to answer the question properly we would need to see a url format of your current images and the format of the new platform images. As it might have to be handled with re-directs, but you might also be able to pull some dns trickery too.

[tomnivore]

Hi folks sorry for slow reply and many thanks for the responses

here's a typical image url showing high up on page 1 for petite shoes search

http://www.pretty-small-shoes.com/acatalog/Petite-Size-Pretty-Wedding-Shoes-First-Dance-220.jpg

????

regards

Tom

[KaneJamison]

If image search is important to you, I would suggest creating 301 redirects for all image URLs. Unfortunately, there's not an easier answer than that, especially on a self-hosted platform.

If you aren't able to do that then you'll need to get by with simply uploading a new image sitemap to Google webmaster tools, and start fixing the 404 errors manually when they show up in GWT. Assuming your pages are 301ing to the new URL, then Google should find the new images pretty quickly, but might take awhile to gain rankings back.