Massive drop in image traffic after site redesign, How to redirect image traffic?

[ichthyous]

I recently replaced a ten year old photography site with about 4,000 pages with a new wordpress site. The new site consolidated a lot of duplicate pages and also I removed old content that really wasn't being requested. The new site shrank to about 1,500 pages...so 4,000+ pages redirected to a smaller number of pages. The overall effect was a fairly big drop in organic search traffic of around 13% due to the amount of pages that were removed. They may have been dupes, but they were all effectively made to look different with varying titles and descriptions. The smaller overall amount of content and internal links in the site had a big effect, with some landing pages losing up to 80% of their traffic...others shot upward though.

An even worse effect was a massive drop in image traffic. I did not redirect another 4,000+ images as my .htaccess file was already huge with the list of 301 redirected html pages. Also, all of the images changed and were made newer, larger, watermarked with new branding and had a different file name. From everything I read Google will simply not see the new file as the same image and will just drop the old image from the index anyway. Because of the way the old CMS handled image urls with dynamic url strings it was impossible to copy the old iimages with the exact same filename to the new site. So I simply wrote one rewrite rule to grab the referral string and rewrite it to the new filename and then the old image could be found on the new site. This didn't really work and I have lost about 85% of my image traffic, which contributed to another 25% decline to my total traffic. On top of this Google's update around the 1st of October seemed to hit the new site hard and it took another big drop down and has stayed there this entire month.

As far as I can tell, the old images had a lot of links coming in and this has dropped my positioning dramatically. I am wondering how to recover those links to images and forward them to new pages or images? It's been a month and a half, is it too late already? Thanks for any advice!

[keyplyr]

The new site consolidated a lot of duplicate pages and also I removed old content that really wasn't being requested.

Did you use 301 redirects from these old pages to the new locations to keep your traffic (and some of the link juice?)

Otherwise, old incoming links (even from link directories like Google Image) will be dead links now. It may take some time for all these new paths to be crawled and indexed. Then you may see gains with incoming image traffic again.

[ichthyous]

Did you use 301 redirects from these old pages to the new locations to keep your traffic (and some of the link juice?)

Yes, every single page on my site has a redirect to the new page, almost 5,000 lines of 301 redirects in total. The one thing I did not expect was that when the new site replaced the old site, I didn't copy over old redirects from the old site's htaccess file. Those had been in place for years and should have already transferred. When the new site went live google came looking for pages that hadn't existed on my site for up to ten years! I had to quickly add a lot more redirects to cover old pages that were not even present on my previous site for years. Google has a very long memory indeed.

What did not get effectively redirected are the image urls themselves. The images got wiped from Google images and I have no way of knowing whether the images from the new pages will ever rank as well since the old images were hotlinked to death over the last ten years, and that drove the images up in rank (I think).

[ichthyous]

It may take some time for all these new paths to be crawled and indexed.

They were all crawled lighting fast, and in google search console it appears that the number of indexed pages is only slightly less than the number of pages submitted on the sitemap. The number of indexed images is much lower than the number of images on the sitemap.

One question I had is that in some cases I redirected pages to category landing pages if there was no similar content page. Now I am turning a lot of the pages that I had decided to leave off the new site back on because they were older images that weren't so interesting anymore. I am finding that some of the categories that were hit the hardest are recovering somewhat by adding the content back and basically making the categories larger and more content heavy again. Unfortunately all those pages I tried to thin out were redirected to categories in August and not to their new page on the new site (which was turned off until now)

[edited by: ichthyous at 11:19 pm (utc) on Oct 20, 2016]

[keyplyr]

What did not get effectively redirected are the image urls themselves. The images got wiped from Google images and I have no way of knowing whether the images from the new pages will ever rank as well since the old images were hotlinked to death over the last ten years, and that drove the images up in rank (I think).

So I think you've likely figured it out. Hopefully it won't take too long for these images to get reindexed (and hot-linked - ha)

[ichthyous]

It took ten years of accumulated links, so I'll be bankrupt waiting for that again. Also, back then I ranked a lot higher and had a lot more traffic as there was a fraction of the competition. These days those images will never accumulate as many links. Is there any way to redirect any incoming links to images so that I can keep the value? I still see a lot of requests for the images on the server as 404 errors