How to use SEO-friendly permanent image urls on cloudfront with netlify?

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1

I use netlify to host my website, www.ingo-steinke.de.

After I activated netlify’s asset optimization, all images are now hosted on cloudfront.
While this offers the benefits of quick load time and automatic image file optimization, there is one feature that leaves me unsure about search engine optimization.

The image file paths are changed to cloudfront URLs in my website’s source code already, probably to prevent unnecessary redirects.

But I fear this might make image search engines, like google images, index the cloudfront URLs instead of my website’s URLs (which are still functional, but not used on my website anymore).

Example:

This original image URL serves the image from my website’s domain and with the exact path I intended it to be and to be indexed by image search:
https://www.ingo-steinke.de/img/ingo-steinke-portrait-2020.jpg

This is the image URL used with asset optimization:
https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/1cc7c854a3e57dd05ecaf7f6153d5736820f3d76/58b8a/img/ingo-steinke-portrait-2020.jpg

Is it possible to keep the original URL but make it redirect to the CDN?
Is it possible to use a permanent personalized cloudfront subdomain?
How to achieve this, if necessary?
How to find out if this is even necessary or rather possibly harmful?

Do I have to decide if I rather optimize for webspeed / web performance or image search? What is considered best practice now? Is there any official statement about the dilemma by Google or Bing?

2

Pretty sure you don’t need to worry about it. All my images are hosted on CloudFront, try site:www.matspar.se on Google and click images.

3

Sadly, no.

I don’t think so.

It’s probably not harmful at all. Using external images doesn’t affect SEO, I guess. As long as the images are valid, they have a proper and descriptive alt text and the content on the rest of the page is considered worthy enough by the crawlers, it’d get indexed. To the end user, these won’t even be a noticeable difference. If they actually check Google Search’s Image results for your website, and click on the image (or the visit page button), Google is going to send the users to your website and not Cloudfront as it’s your website that’s actually displaying the images. The only time when someone might notice (unless deliberately checking for image sources) is when they copy the image URL, or when they check the URL in the downloads list in case they save the image.

4

You don’t have to worry. If you check image search results, though it is hosted with cloudfront, you can see the link to your website below the image. Make sure you add alt text.

5

As the forum’s “savvy bot” asked me to mark a solution or post again, I hereby state, that I didn’t worry, but I also don’t think that the original question has been answered yet.