301 for image ranking needed if html page is redirected?

[ichthyous]

My arts related site draws a good portion of its traffic from Google image search. I am rolling out an entirely new site after 9 years and all the image urls are changing. I am worried about losing most of that GI traffic. Is it recommended to 301 redirect not only that changed HTML page urls, but also the image urls as well? I have done some research and read that ranking may be preserved if the image is redirected AND the file name remains the same...can anyone confirm this? Thanks!

[JS_Harris]

Image URIs are treated the same as page URIs, they need to resolve if visited directly. If you store all of your images in a folder, such as /images/, then it should be pretty straight forward to point requests from the old location to the new location for all images at once.

I can confirm that if the actual image file is left unchanged(name, size, content, resolution etc... same file) and you 301 redirect to it's new location that image rank will not likely be affected to any great extent. That's not guaranteed, Google treats all URIs independently, but the same files should rank in the same locations.

Are you creating an entirely new domain? That might play a rankings role since the new domain will have no history, no trust etc.

[RedBar]

<off topic>

I'm curious as to how you're still getting Google and Bing visitors after their great image grabs a couple of years or so ago?

My image sites have lost more than 90% of their PVs since the grab, do you have your site locked down so that viewers HAVE to visit your site for enlargements etc?

</off topic>

[ichthyous]

@JS Harris
Thank you that is exactly what I wanted to know! The image resolution is changing for all the images...going up from 600-700px to 1000px across the board. The domain is not changing, and many of the top level category urls are not changing. Some subcategories have been merged and ALL sub-subcategory urls are being converted to tags. I am making sure that all categories go no deeper than two levels.

All of the lowest level page urls that contain these images are also being moved up to the top and into one folder, i.e. /photos/pagename/...they are currently buried in their respective subcategory folders, ie. /photos/category/subcategory/pagename/. I am wondering if the same goes for page urls as the image urls? If I keep the page names exactly the same and move them all into one directory will it help preserve the rank? They are not all in the same directory now.

@Red Bar
I also lost a ton of traffic when Google made changes to GI search a few years back. Approx 40% of my total traffic vanished in one shot. I am still getting a considerable amount of traffic from image search though...perhaps people are just moving to my site to see what else is there? Since they have to contact me on my site to browse and purchase anything...I also watermark all of my images with my logo and site url.

[JS_Harris]

I'm curious as to how you're still getting Google and Bing visitors after their great image grabs a couple of years or so ago?

It's still brutal here too. For 100k web impressions I can expect a decent % to click through but it takes 100x that number of image impressions to get the same amount of traffic and it's of much lower quality so isn't truly comparable. I consider image search a non-factor now, it wouldn't even rank above the smallest of search engines in terms of how much quality traffic I get from it. It's expensive traffic too, images get hotlinked and spammers place the images on spam sites with a backlink to me which does me no good, at best.

I'm actually ordering Google not to index images on one site, I wanted to know how many of my "web" results were actually images sneaking into the "related images" section of web results. I got my answer, it was about 18% but I now have text results showing up where I used to only get related image results so I can't measure that anymore.

[ichthyous]

Do you have your site locked down so that viewers HAVE to visit your site for enlargements etc?

No I don't, not even sure how that is accomplished. I have read about various javascript techniques but that's risky. Considering that this is an image based site it's not really possible for me to block Google from indexing my images either. Having the images watermarked with a big logo and URL does bring in people to the site, although there's really no way of quantifying that amount. All I know is that people tell me "I was searching for images in Google and found your site..."

[flatfile]

@ichthyous

The image resolution is changing for all the images...going up from 600-700px to 1000px across the board.

From my experience Google will detect the resolution change and your rankings will change. I once made that type of change on a site, withing a week there was a crawl spike on the images and then Google started deindexing the old images. Getting the new images completely indexed took a very long time.

[RedBar]

Having the images watermarked

I tried that and seemed to lose even more traffic, FWIW in my widget sector there are very few watermarked images these days however a heck of a lot of incorrectly labelled ones, e.g. saying green when it should be red etc!

[ichthyous]

@flatfile
That's not good news, but this is an important design change for my site so it's unavoidable. It's just not possible to stay with all the old images at their old sizes, and the logo branding has changed too. Did you 301 your old image files to the new larger image files?

@redbar
In my field it's very important to have the file watermarked because the product is the image itself so they have to know where to find you. I think that is why I probably draw in more traffic from GI, they have to visit the site to get more info about the image itself.

[flatfile]

@ichthyous
I wasn't doing a redirect on that domain and I made no URL or file name changes. All I did was replace the images with larger versions. I had always thought Google just hated that domain until last month when John Mueller confirmed that Google reindexes images less frequently [seroundtable.com ].

[RedBar]

Google reindexes images less frequently

Ah, at long last a confirmation of what I had suspected for quite some time.

Is this an admission that the image grab screwed-up and they're not making any money out of stealing our images whereas image gallery owners could do?

the product is the image itself

Ok then that's understandable why you didn't lose as much traffic as me. My images are for my industry, specialised construction products, they're sort of generic however each image is unique and of good quality and unlike a lot of other images I see in my industry and search results, they are correct!

[ichthyous]

@flatfile

Thanks for the link...just what I feared. There's no way around it, even if I stick with the same file name. Also I have thousands of hot links to my images at this point...it should be interesting to see how resetting all the images and losing the hotlinks helps or hurts ranking...