Images in posts showing up with their own URL.
I did a site check on google for my website using the "site:mywebsite.com" to pull up all of my indexed pages on Google.
Along with my pages and posts, there were a plethora of indexed images shown with their very own URL all by themselves.
Here's a sampling:
For the life of me, I am ignorant as to how this happens. These are pictures that should only be in my pages and posts. They shouldn't have their own webpage.
I did a "redirect" in my Yoast SEO permalinks setting. But, that only sends the link directly to the correct page. It doesn't stop Google from listing these pictures as separate webpages.
Any WA experts available to tell me what causes this phenomena?
Help is appreciated!
And...Merry Christmas!
Jim
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Sorry to hear about this for you Bpais1's hope you can use that easier way out down the list of fixes Scott
This is something that should be covered in training. I am not there yet But I hope to place images into my website, and I am sOOO happy to come across this before I get there. I just hope I remember about this when I do get there. Thanks for the heads up Scott
According to leoemery (see the link to his training post below), Google can penalize you for these attachment pages because they are seen as low content pages by them.
Jim
I am curious the answer. At the same time at least you are all over Google. Ha haha. All good right?
I am not too happy about images that rank by themselves, Jared. And, there are well over 800 of them.
I just can't figure out how they appear out of nowhere as their very own URL. Especially since they are only placed into pages and posts.
Jim
800 is a lot.
Should be a good thread for some insight on it. I did not mean to add to your valid frustrations.
I just found a post by leoemery from 2014 that may help: This Is Probably Hurting Your Websites Rank In Google Jim
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Hi Bob
Hi The easiest way is to go to your;
Dashboard
All in One SEO => General Settings=>scroll down to "Redirect Attachments to Post Parent"=>check the box and go to bottom of page and click "Update"
"This setting will redirect media attachment URLs back to their parent post. If you embed an image into a post/page and link it to the Attachment Page then this will redirect to the parent post when a visitor clicks on the image."
In the meantime. you can also use the Google URL removal tool to remove the image URLs one at a time.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
When you add an image to a post or page, it is automatically given a URL or location within your site, That's where it "lives" on the web host's server(s).
Lastly, you could also edit your robots.txt file to stop images from being index
e.g.
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
David
Once this is fixed, your bounce rate in Google Analytics should also decrease. This is a good thing. Let me know how it goes.
I'm using Yoast SEO and I did a permalink "redirect." So, all the image attachment pages will revert to the page or post that the are attached to.
After that, I resubmitted my sitemaps.
I'm hoping that this is enough to ward off the nefarious Google penalties that result from low content image attachment pages.
What do you think?
Yes, that is fine. It will probably take a while to be rectified though because of caching etc.
I would also use the "URL remove tool" I sent you.
David
Thanks, David. Good advice!
Jim
The URL remove tool denies my removal requests. Oh well, I'll just wait to see what happens with the redirect.
Jim
Thank you! I was having the same issue :)