Hi Mike,

I'd personally say that you're fine, depending how you impliment it.

I personally believe that as long as the text that you add reads what the image contains, you're fine.

SEOmoz even use image replacement!

Good luck!

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?

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.

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?

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!

We all have our own views on certain aspects of SEO I guess, however I strongly view all extensions as equal value (unless of-course you're using a .us when targeting a UK audience).

There will be more factors than simply the extension, have you got an example you could send over where you're seeing the EMD .co.uk outranking the .org.uk?

That's correct what you said regarding how Google looks for a GEO within WMT's and then if there's nothing set within WMT's it'll look for other clues, such as the domain extension.

If you have a ccTLD though, Google will set a default location within WMT's that you can't change (there are some ccTLD's that are excempt from this rule, .co.uk and .org.uk aren't excempt though).

Basically, you're focusing on the main correlation (the domain extension) that you can see between all of the points and assuming that's the main factor.

It's nothing to do with the extension that when you're conducting a search, you're only seeing .com's in the results. A .com domain has just as much chance as a .us domain as ranking when targeting in the US.

There are other reason why there's not a .us ranking within the results for the queries that you're searching for, it's just a correlation that you're seeing.

Correlation not causation - sorry Rand, I stole that phrase from you!

When targeting for the US, a .us domain has just as much chance of ranking as a .com domain has, it's simply a correlation that the results you're seeing down have a .us ranking - not a causation.

Hi Nicholas,

Unfortunately not. The sitemap reference has to be absolute. (You can confirm this by using the crawler access tool within WMT's)

I'd suggest that you create a PHP script to create a robots.txt file with the correct domain rather than having to do it manually.

Good luck!