: How to SEO one "routing" image URL to multiple canonical image URLs? Background: I am developing a web service that will provide tooltips to fan sites for collectible gaming cards. The potential

@Angie530

PHP Redirect Idea:

To bypass .htaccess all together I could serve php scripts with a .php.jpg extension. The server would parse the php but the url looks sort-of like a jpg. With this solution I can just hard-code the desired server into the script.

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@Angie530

.htaccess Redirect Idea

Similar to my URL Params Idea, but better I think. Here I would hard-code the image redirects into an .htaccess file. I had not considered this before because of the sheer number of images I have to work with, but I could group them into folders and use separate .htaccess files in each folder, to distribute the rules. I can programatically update the .htaccess rules whenever I want to toggle image servers.

Example:
permalink.mydomain.com/12345.jpg >> 302 redirect >> img1.mydomain.com/12345.jpg

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@Moriarity557

URL Parameters Idea:

Could I indefinately use (302, 303, or 307) redirects to route requests to one of the servers, while keeping page rank at the original URL? The key here is that the server will change, and the resource will never actually reside at the "router" URL. I would use Google's Webmaster Tools to mark the URL parameters don't change content. Is this a no-no? This is a hack and not preferred as it doesn't SEO other search engines.

Example:

Server 1 (CNAMEd to img1.mydomain.com)
permalink.mydomain.com/12345.jpg?server=img1 > img1.mydomain.com/12345.jpg

Server 2 (CNAMEd to img2.mydomain.com)
permalink.mydomain.com/12345.jpg?server=img2 > img2.mydomain.com/12345.jpg

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@Nimeshi995

Is there any way to setup a URL to act as a router to these different
images? The routing URL should be indexed by search engines.


The most efficient and affordable way to accomplish this is to use a content delivery network (CDN), which would cache your images on servers around the world, and serve them from the server located closest to the requesting client, without any additional bandwidth costs.

As indicated from one such CDN, CloudFlare:


CloudFlare operates out of 23 data centers around the world. Our CDN
automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these
files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic
content directly from your web server. CloudFlare then uses a
technology called Anycast to route your visitors to the nearest data
center. The result is that your website, on average, loads twice as
fast for your visitors regardless of where they are located.

On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its
visitors, sees 65% fewer requests and saves 60% of bandwidth. You’ll
be able to see the exact speed benefits and savings with your
personalized CloudFlare analytics report for your site.

We never charge for bandwidth


Using a CDN, your image URLs would remain the same, without the need to route them to backup servers.

The other ideas presented would likely not play well with search engines; they might view them as an attempt at cloaking or other black hat technique, potentially resulting in penalties.

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