Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts

[RMATVMC]

For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like

images.domain.com

Rather than domain.com/images/

We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.

[DirkC]

Hi Jared,

Webmaster tools is indeed the only way you can check what the % of image search is (you can also see it in Google Analytics if you have linked both accounts - it is the same data however as it's measured via webmaster tools). Solution you put in place seems a very good idea.

rgds

Dirk

[RMATVMC]

Dirk,

Thanks for your quality response! Within webmaster tools we get a decent amount of clicks from image search but still less then 10% of our overall organic traffic. Without being able to filter out that the traffic is coming from an image in GA I am not sure how else I can gauge how much organic traffic we are getting from images. We came up with the solution leaving our current images at their location but moving new images to the subdomain. Because much of our inventory changes with new seasonal lines we are adding lots of new products so those images will all be hosted on the sub-domain.

Thanks,

[DirkC]

Do you get al lot of traffic from image search? If not, I don't think it really matters, there are thousands of site who are using the same setup as you.

if you get a lot of traffic from image search you need to be careful. Never moved from main domain to sub domain, but did a recent migration of a site where 80% of traffic came from image search. All the images were moved to a new folder.

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, 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 the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number  of sites 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.

hope this helps

Dirk