SEO and Image URLs

[Darth]

Say you have a car website with lots of car images that get some traffic/views in Google Images.

You also want to move to an image serving product that doesn't support CNAME.

So your images would all changes from domain.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/.... to imageservice.com/img/... - something like that

I get you could 301 redirect existing images, but I would be worried about if say, someone hotlinks to an image, they would be hotlinking to the imageservice.com domain and not mine. And I would be losing juice.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Hotlinking is when you embed the image itself, not linking directly to the image's URL. I don't think this passes any link juice like a link would.

But yes, I would imagine that, while Google Images might send viewers (and traffic) to your page, it would still think (rightfully so) that the image is hosted on a different domain. I'm not sure if juice comes into play here, but some other kind of hidden metric might.