How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
-
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts.
I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed.
I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions.
1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google
2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from.
What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc.
All suggestions greatly received!
-
Yes, the Yoast plug-in's settings will alter your robots.txt and fix the problem across your site.
-
Thanks for the advice!
I have emailed the theme creator to see if they can edit the template file to remove these additional pages.
In the meantime I have just noticed that the YOAST plugin has an option to redirect all these attached images pages to the parent page. This is just a tick in a box. Will this simple option work?
Thanks again!
-
Hi,
We have worked on a site in a similar situation as the one you're in.
I would personally remove the linked media through the appropriate template file. I assume there's no reason for these pages to even be there?
If possible, you could set these pages to noindex.
If all else fails, you could set a canonical tag to the original post where the image resides, this would eliminate any issues from an SEO point of view.
Regards,
Anthony Ankers
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
-
Internally linked pages from different subdomain must be well optimised?
Hi all, We have guide/help pages from different subdomain (help.website.com). And we have linked these from 3rd hierarchy level pages of our website (website.com/folder1/topic2). But help.website sumdomain & pages are not well optimised. So, I am not sure linking these subdomain pages from our website pages hurts our rankings? Thanks,
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
How do we get search engine bots to the item detail pages?
The problem we have is that we have lots of inventory pages. These inventory pages have a bunch of links at the top linking to different styles of the item, up to 56 links in some cases. Then each item listed has a link to the item's detail page and a link to the item's shop owner's page. So if a page has 50 items shown, there are really 100 links just for the inventory. This is not taking into account the header links, footer links, sidebar links to other sections on the site. We have all these links to help consumers move through the site. The problem is that every item detail page on the site is not getting indexed and actually I think it's more like over 50% of the item detail pages are not indexed because the search engines are too busy following all these other links. Should we nofollow, index the links to the different styles of the item, the shop owner page? Or what should we do to get the search engine bots to index our item detail pages?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Site as one page - SEO implications
We may be inheriting a site and will be asked to do SEO for it. We will have control over the development of the site, so this structure is what it is. My question is - how significant of an impact do you think this is going to have and can you think of any workarounds that may help? Basically, the user experience of the site will feel similar to multiple pages. However, this site will, in essence be one page and pull various content through javascript from different locations. I have not seen the site yet (and believe it is still in development), but this is how it has been explained to me. Any thoughts? My first thought was to add a blog to add page depth to the site and expand the content. Any other thoughts are welcome and appreciated. Thanks. (I know this is limited information, I'm sorry. It's just about all I have to work with right now, and I was a little concerned and was hoping for a second opinion)
Web Design | | AdamWormann0 -
Subdomains, duplicate content and microsites
I work for a website that generates a high amount of unique, quality content. This website though has had development issues with our web builder and they are going to separate the site into different subdomains upon launch. It's a scholarly site so the subdomains will be like history and science and stuff. Don't ask why aren't we aren't using subdirectories because trust me I wish we could. So we have to use subdomains and I'm wondering a couple questions. Will the duplication of coding, since all subdomains will have the same design and look, heavily penalize us and is there any way around that? Also if we generate a good amount of high quality content on each site could we link all those sites to our other site as a possible benefit for link building? And finally, would footer links, linking all the subdirectories, be a good thing to put in?
Web Design | | mdorville0 -
Too Many On Page Links, rel="nofollow" and rel="external"
Hi, Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine. It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold. Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so: Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"? Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view? Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others? As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Web Design | | Tinhat0 -
Has anyone had luck doing SEO with a wordpress website built with Parallax?
Has anyone worked with Parallax before? Is it possible and worth it to do SEO on a wordpress site that uses Parallax? I have a friend that is asking. Currently when you navigate their site there is only one URL (home page) and one title tag.
Web Design | | webestate0 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0 -
Do Pages That Rearrange Set Off Any Red Flags for Google?
We have a broad content site that includes crowdsourced lists of items. A lot of the pages allow voting, which causes the content on the pages (sometimes the content is up to 10 pages deep) to completely rearrange, and therefore spread out and switch pages often among the (up to 10) pages of content. Now, could this be causing any kind of duplicate content or any other kind of red flags for Google? I know that the more the page changes the better, but if it's all the same content that is being moved up and down constantly, could Google think we're pulling some kind of "making it look like we have new content" scheme and ding us for these pages? If so, what would anyone recommend we do? Let's take an example of a list of companies with bad customer service. We let the internet vote them up and down all the time, the order changes depending on the votes in real time. Is that page doomed, or does Google see it and love it?
Web Design | | BG19850