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
-
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Does Google Index URLs that are always 302 redirected
Hello community Due to the architecture of our site, we have a bunch of URLs that are 302 redirected to the same URL plus a query string appended to it. For example: www.example.com/hello.html is 302 redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc The www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc page also has a link canonical tag to www.example.com/hello.html In the above example, can www.example.com/hello.html every be Indexed, by google as I assume the googlebot will always be redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc and will never see www.example.com/hello.html ? Thanks in advance for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommRulz0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
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 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0