Migrating images from CDN to main domain - URL change

[andreicomoti]

Hello,

I am about to migrate all images from cdn.domain.com to a new server on www.domain.com. So practically all the URLs of the images on my product pages will change.

I have some questions:

1. My webmaster said that it is impossible to redirect all image URLs, so I want to know if this will bring out some problems Google Images rankings? When I search for a keyword in Google, and then click on the Image section, I see the image on my product page, but when I click preview Google pops out the product URL, not the image URL. The product URL will remain the same, so I guess if the URL of the image changes, rankings will not be affected. Is this right?

2. I see a folder /cache/ in this structure of the URL of all the images (CDN structure), so I guess google cached the images. The images will not change, only the URL will change. How long will it take for google to update the cache with the new URLs? Will it affect rankings (a second scenario)?

3. I don't have a sitemap for images on my current CDN, but all images will be included in the new sitemap with the new URLs - will this help Google update the URLs of the images faster? Can I place my trust on this step for a fast indexing of new URLs?

I have approx. 200K product URLs in Google, and an average of 3 image URLs on each product page, so we are talking about 600K image URLs in total.

Any opinion of past experience will be really helpful for me. Thanks!

[tangor]

There must be a compelling reason to move the images from cdn to example.com. Curious as to why.

Any changes to page v image links will have a profound effect.

Never used sitemap to boost image urls, so can't answer that.

600,000 new urls will take some time to process, particularly since g has its own internal spend on indexing a site at any given time.

[tangor]

Also keep in mind the limitations of site maps:

5. Sitemap Index

There are a few limitations you'll want to keep in mind for sitemaps:

Having too many URLs will only lead to no indexation of some of your pages.
All sitemaps, except the news sitemap, should have a maximum of 50,000 URLs.
News sitemaps should have a maximum of 1000 URLs.
A sitemap should be a maximum of 50MB in uncompressed file size.

As a result of those limitations, you might need to have more than one sitemap. When you use more than one sitemap file, you need an index file that lists all of those sitemaps. It's the index file that you submit in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

[blog.hubspot.com...]

[tangor]

Anyone have good numbers of g's site indexing spend? For most of my sites it appears to be 100-500 per day... most of the time.

Might go days between each run...

[lucy24]

My webmaster said that it is impossible to redirect all image URLs

Why? Is the whole site's URL structure also changing, not just from cdn.example.com/blahblah to www.example.com/blahblah? What happens to the non-image URLs?

When your webmaster says “impossible” he means, of course, “inconvenient for me”--almost nothing is truly impossible--but is it so vastly inconvenient and time-consuming that you’d have to pay extra?

[andreicomoti]

@lucy24

No, the non-image URLs will remain the same.

There are approximately 600K image URLs currently on the website. Most of them are already uploaded on the beta version of the new platform with different URL paths. We will end our contract with the server service provider and all images will be moved. Our webmaster said that it is impossible to make redirects (to match old URLs with new URLs), but said that it will not be a problem since the images are embedded in the code and google ranks product URL (not image URLs). Even if the old URLs will 404, Google will have time to catch the new URLs and still see the images, so no problems for rankings. I don't know if this is true.

[lucy24]

So you're essentially rebuilding the image side of the site from scratch. One thing you might do is serve a 410 on all the old image URLs, assuming they fit some kind of pattern where this can be done fairly easily. A 410 response tends to make G### stop crawling a little sooner, which means they'll have more of their crawl budget left over for the new URLs.

Your webmaster is right that G will have no trouble identifying the new URLs, since they’re all linked from URLs that have already been found. With 600k of them, it's even possible their computer will realize “Whoops! There’s been a major change here, so better re-crawl the entire site.”

Expect some major upheavals in your overall SERP standing--definitely for images, but possibly even for pages. Give it time to level out. (I'd guess at least a month, but someone hereabouts will know better than me.) Much, of course, will depend on what proportion of your search traffic comes in by way of images--that is, people who start out in image search and then go to the page the image belongs to.