Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
-
Hey,
I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them.
I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ".
Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem?
get_header(); ?>
/* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
-
This plugin automatically 301 redirects image attachment pages to the parent post, simply install and activate, done:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/attachment-pages-redirect/
-
Just because you make it yourself and it doesn't install from the control panel..... doesn't mean it is not a plugin.
However, it is a very specialized plugin that will do the job without cluttering anything else up.
Make sure you save a copy out to the side in case you loose it in updates.
-
I found a great solution for this without using a plugin:
http://www.lancelhoff.com/wordpress-disable-image-attachment-page-links/
It works for me on my site
Chad
-
Having same problem, i have so many duplicate pages (more than 350) and all them caused by wordpress attachments. All i can do as keri said link images to direct image url or dont link at all.
Right now i'm going to remove all hyper-links from images. Easy way.
No wait i used this option in yoast plugin and it redirects attachments. I don't know why its not working for "TauriU "
Tick: Redirect attachment URL's to parent post URL.
-
I insert the image via the image icon, then I put the link in as the URL of the image itself. There's a button that talks about which to link to, can't remember exactly what it's called, but look for that option in the link page.
-
Hi Keri, I'm also having problems dozens of Wordpress attachment pages being indexed in google. When you say you link directly to the image do you mean that when you add an image you use the add 'from URL' option?
-
What I have done on my wordpress site is to make sure I'm linking directly to the image and not to the attachment page. If someone clicks on the image, they get a nice large (2000 pixel wide) image by itself, no attachment page or anything. I don't know if that will work for you, but it does work in my case.
-
I wasn't able to figure out how this plugin works exactly:( lack of knowledge, on my part.
My site url is if this is any help. And if you click here http://tinyurl.com/8x55yh8 you see what google site:domainname.com search bring out. All those attachment pages should redirect to parent post URL's.
i hope this is at least a bit helpful information
-
OK, do you happen to have Live HTTP Headers for FireFox (or any other tool/plug-in that'd be able to record all http headers) so you can see what exactly is happening with the redirects?
If so, could you again paste that over to pastebin.com?
-
I tried your suggestion, but it doesn't work unfortunately
i m using custom permalink structure. /%postname%
is there any possibility that issue lays in " /%postname% " structure.
-
i have already done lots of optimization in Yoast plugin:) don't want to change plugins now. but i try it out when nothing else doesn't work
-
OK, there's nothing strange with the htaccess.
I'd suggest that you now disable all of the plug-ins expect for Yoast's just so you can debug if the issue is due to any other plug-ins installed.
I know it sounds strange, but I'd also suggest that you go to the permalinks section of the WordPress admin and update the settings - don't change anything at the moment, just update. Sometimes that can reset any issues with the permalinks.
-
i posted my site .htaccess file to pastebin.com. ulr http://pastebin.com/cLVNNCkb
List of active plug-ins.
AdRotate
Better Tag Cloud
Cleanup Wordpress
Contact Form 7
Featured Page Widget
Flexi Pages Widget
Link Carousel
MailChimp Widget
WordPress Importer
WordPress SEO by Yoast's
WP-Table Reloaded
WP SlimStat
WP SlimStat ShortCodes
I hope it help:) those freaking attachment pages are messing up my rankings:)
-
For more than 2 months I'd been tested another SEO plugin - SEO Ultimate. IMHO it is the best plugin for WP at the time. It is very flexible and it is possible to decide about almost every element of a page. It has follow/nofollow and index/noindex manager and tons of other features.
I don't have attachment pages indexed
-
Hmm, that's pretty strange. It sounds like you could have an issue with your htaccess file.
Could you paste your .htaccess file to pastebin.com?
You also said that you've attempted to use a few different plug-ins to achieve this - I'd suggest that you double check that the other plug-ins aren't active. Would you be able to send over a list of the plug-ins that are active too, in addition to the .htaccess file contents?
-
Thank you for a quick answer.
Yoast's SEO plug-in is my main SEO plugin. I have tried option in the plugin that should Redirect attachment URL's to parent post URL's. Unfortunately it doesn't work.
I get a error: "too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ".
-
Hi there,
This is common with WordPress, attatchments by default have their own pages.
Have you heard of Yoast's SEO plug-in before?
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
I'd recommend that you install Yoast's SEO plug-in, it has the ability to redirect attachment pages back to the main page which is what you're trying to achieve.
If you do use Yoast's SEO plug-in, let me know how you get on.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Google Adsbot crawling order confirmation pages?
Hi, We have had roughly 1000+ requests per 24 hours from Google-adsbot to our confirmation pages. This generates an error as the confirmation page cannot be viewed after closing or by anyone who didn't complete the order. How is google-adsbot finding pages to crawl that are not linked to anywhere on the site, in the sitemap or linked to anywhere else? Is there any harm in a google crawler receiving a higher percentage of errors - even though the pages are not supposed to be requested. Is there anything we can do to prevent the errors for the benefit of our network team and what are the possible risks of any measures we can take? This bot seems to be for evaluating the quality of landing pages used in for Adwords so why is it trying to access confirmation pages when they have not been set for any of our adverts? We included "Disallow: /confirmation" in the robots.txt but it has continued to request these pages, generating a 403 page and an error in the log files so it seems Adsbot doesn't follow robots.txt. Thanks in advance for any help, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist0 -
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search?
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
About us. Contact us
Services. Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png0 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Malicious site pointed A-Record to my IP, Google Indexed
Hello All, I launched my site on May 1 and as it turns out, another domain was pointing it's A-Record to my IP. This site is coming up as malicious, but worst of all, it's ranking on keywords for my business objectives with my content and metadata, therefore I'm losing traffic. I've had the domain host remove the incorrect A-Record and I've submitted numerous malware reports to Google, and attempted to request removal of this site from the index. I've resubmitted my sitemap, but it seems as though this offending domain is still being indexed more thoroughly than my legitimate domain. Can anyone offer any advice? Anything would be greatly appreciated! Best regards, Doug
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FranGen0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0