In this blog, I will explain you “How to Stop Search Engine from Indexing WordPress Attachment Page”.
So just stick on and find out how you can get rid of this extremely serious flaw with WordPress.
As a WordPress user, you would agree with me that WordPress is a highly user friendly and one of the most popular blogging and CMS (Content Management System) platform.
Nowadays, WordPress is a preferred platform for millions of blogs and websites. Its outstanding features, easy usability and powerful customization abilities makes it a winner among blogging and CMS platforms.
Having said this, inspite of its remarkable features, there is one notable and very serious flaw in WordPress platform. And this flaw is WordPress Attachment Pages or WordPress Image Attachment Pages.
As a proactive blogger or webmaster, you must make every effort in dealing with this utterly annoying problem of WordPress Attachment Page. More specifically you have to make sure that Search Engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) are not able to Index WordPress Attachment Page.
So, let us drill down further to get to know what are WordPress Attachment Pages, how they negatively impact your Site’s SEO, and the last and most important thing, “How to Stop Search Engine from Indexing WordPress Attachment Pages”.
WordPress Attachment Page
Generally, you would have not imagined ever that uploading images to your blog post from the WordPress post editor could actually seriously affect your site’s SEO performance and could lead to a major SEO blunder.
You might be wondering why this could happen?
Let me brief you.
Actually, whenever you go onto upload an image to a new blog post from the WordPress post editor, WordPress goes onto create a separate image attachment page. These image attachment pages that are created by WordPress do not hold any content except for the image(s) for the post.
For example, suppose the URL of one of your blog post is http://yourwebsite.com/blog-post/ . It has an image with the file name of image.png. When you go onto publish this article, the blog post URL will take the form as, http://yourwebsite.com/blog-post/1/ depending upon the structure of the permalink used on your site.
- Upto this point, it’s absolutely fine.
- However, with WordPress things do not end here.
- It actually goes onto create what is known as WordPress Attachment Pages or WordPress Image Attachment Pages.
So, WordPress will also create a new page which contains only the image that have used or attached in your blog post that you have already published.
So in this case, the URL of the image page will be: http://yourwebsite.com/blog-post/image/ .
So in this case, the URL of the image page will be: http://yourwebsite.com/blog-post/image/ .
Now, creation of WordPress Attachment Pages is a serious flaw that needs to be addressed at the highest priority. With WordPress when you publish a blog post, not only the URL for the original article is generated, but also other URL’s will be created for the images that are attached with the blog post and that too without any content.
Moreover, these useless attachment pages do not contain the “NoIndex” Meta tag which actually means that Search Engines can discover and index WordPress Attachment Pages. Once such pages are indexed by Search Engines, it leads to serious SEO flaw. Search Engines find many unnecessary and useless pages in your site which go onto harm the overall SEO reputation of your site. As these pages don’t contains any content search engine like Google think them as thin content or page with no user value. Thus Google can degrade your entire site on search result.
Furthermore, it thins up the amount of “Google Juice” flowing in your actual blog posts. Checking on the source code of these attachment pages reveals the fact they are actually not NoIndexed.
So, for SEO purpose you need to stop Search Engine from Indexing WordPress Attachment Page.
How to Stop Search Engine from Indexing WordPress Attachment Page
Finally, here’s the good news for WordPress users.
Yes, you can actually prevent indexing of WordPress Attachment Pages. There are some very effective ways through which you can prevent the indexing of useless WordPress Attachment Pages.
Here, I list out the primary one’s for you.
Option 1:
One of the ways is to add a “NoIndex, Follow” Meta Tag to all of your image attachment pages. For this, you have to manually edit the attachment.php or single.php file of your theme and go onto add the Meta Tag.
Option 2:
Another very effective way to fix this problem is by redirecting the image attachment pages to the original blog post or page. This can be done easily by using the Yoast SEO Plugin or All in One SEO Plugin. For this in Yoast SEO Plugin, you have to click on the SEO option in the WordPress and then click on the “Advanced”. This will show you the “Permalinks” Tab. You need to click on this Tab. This will show up the box “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.” Check on this box. Finally, click on “Save Changes”.
This will then redirect the attachment page to the original parent post.
Option 3:
Another easy way to prevent Search Engines from Indexing WordPress Attachment Pages is by clicking into the image attachment page and then marking it as No-Index from within the Yoast Plugin.
Another easy way to prevent Search Engines from Indexing WordPress Attachment Pages is by clicking into the image attachment page and then marking it as No-Index from within the Yoast Plugin.
Option 4:
If you are not using Yoast SEO Plugin, there is yet another way by which you can prevent Search Engine from crawling useless attachment pages of your WordPress blog post. This can be done by using robots.txt file.
If you are not using Yoast SEO Plugin, there is yet another way by which you can prevent Search Engine from crawling useless attachment pages of your WordPress blog post. This can be done by using robots.txt file.
You simply require to copy and paste the following link into your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /?attachment_id
And then click on the Save Button. That’s it.
And then click on the Save Button. That’s it.
Option 5:
Attachment Pages Redirect is yet another great plugin which enables you to easily disable attachment pages and redirect visitors to original parent post or page. You just require installing and activating the plugin. Once the plugin is activated, it redirects users from attachment pages to parent post. If there is no parent post, users are then redirected to homepage. It is as simple as that.
Attachment Pages Redirect is yet another great plugin which enables you to easily disable attachment pages and redirect visitors to original parent post or page. You just require installing and activating the plugin. Once the plugin is activated, it redirects users from attachment pages to parent post. If there is no parent post, users are then redirected to homepage. It is as simple as that.
So, by following the above tips you can easily stop Search Engine from Indexing WordPress Attachment Page.
WordPress Attachment Pages are utterly useless and are major SEO blunder. As a proactive blogger or webmaster you should take every effort to disable them. This will make your SERP listings clean and your visitors would never land on blank pages.
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