Confusion on [noindex, follow] [not found]

  • Resolved pingbara

    (@pingbara)


    3 years, 6 months ago

    My websites currently has a lot of ATTACHMENT PAGES I am trying to elimating this issue as it might destroy my overall ranking. By setting [Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?] to “YES”. This will easily eliminate all attachment pages.

    However, I have below questions:

    1. if setting [Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?] to “YES”. The attachment pages will be redirected to the image itself. I inspect the Meta Robots and Rel=”canonical” of the image itself page, it gives the values of “not found”. So, by having “not found”, will google still rank my images in thier image search section ?

    2. If I don’t use the setting of [Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?] to YES. But instead, I go through each image manually in media library to set [Allow search engines to show this Media in search results?] to “NO”. Will this have the same result comparing to the first method. Because with this second method, i inspect and found that the attachment page still available but the Meta Robots is set to “no index” and the Meta Robots of the image itself is set to “not found”. With my understanding, even I have the attachment page available but it won’t be indexed by google so I don’t need to worry about the thin content bad SEO effect created by the attachment page. Am i right?

    I try to configure this because I might need to keep some attachment pages to be indexed, on the other hand some attachment pages should not be indexed and left only the the image itself to be ranked in google’s image search section.

    Thanks
    Methee

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by pingbara.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by pingbara.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by pingbara.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by pingbara.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by pingbara.
Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    Hi @pingbara

    1. If you have the ‘redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself’ toggle set to ‘yes’, the (normally) thin attachment page will redirect to the image URL itself. Would it be possible for you to provide us with a screenshot and more details how you accessed the meta robots tag for the image file itself and where you are getting the “not found” message?

    As far as I’m aware, as long as you haven’t blocked the crawlers and bots from accessing the file, it should output it in the image search results. You can also learn more about how we add images to the sitemap as well — https://yoast.com/help/images-in-the-xml-sitemap/

    2. If you have the ‘redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself’ toggle set to ‘no’, then it won’t redirect to the image itself. You’ll also be able to configure the attachment pages and check if you want them to show up in the search results or not. If you have it set to ‘no’ for the ‘show in the search results’ option, then the attachment page itself will have a ‘noindex’ tag and won’t show up in the search results. You also won’t have to worry about it being flagged as thin content.

    You can learn more about the redirect image attachment URL feature here — https://yoast.com/help/redirect-image-attachment-urls/

    Thread Starter pingbara

    (@pingbara)

    Hi, with your second answer below:

    2. If you have the ‘redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself’ toggle set to ‘no’, then it won’t redirect to the image itself. You’ll also be able to configure the attachment pages and check if you want them to show up in the search results or not. If you have it set to ‘no’ for the ‘show in the search results’ option, then the attachment page itself will have a ‘noindex’ tag and won’t show up in the search results. You also won’t have to worry about it being flagged as thin content.

    ==> in this case i understand now that the attachment page is safe from thin content as it will not be indexed. But how about the image itself (not attachment page), will the image be able to be indexed by google and shown in image search result.

    Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    Hi,

    Yes, if you’ve marked the attachment page as ‘noindex’, then you wouldn’t need to have any issue of it being flagged as thin content, since you’ve already configured it to have it not show in the search results.

    As for the image file itself, if you haven’t blocked it in your robots.txt file, Google should be able to crawl the image files and have them show up in the image search results. Another of our features is in how we add images to the XML Sitemap, so if you’ve included images in your posts and pages, we automatically add the URL to the file of the image included in those posts or pages, helping increase the chance as well of it being crawled and included in the search results — https://yoast.com/help/images-in-the-xml-sitemap/

    Thread Starter pingbara

    (@pingbara)

    I have one last question.

    If I have the ‘redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself’ toggle set to ‘YES’.

    Then all my attachment pages will be eliminated, I have just re-checked that the amount of attachment pages are around 20000 pages !!. Then in Google Search Console there will be 404 error for 20000 pages as the attachment page are eleminated. If the spider bot comes fast then maybe within a night or a week there will be 20000 of 404 pages !!

    Will such a huge amount of 404 pages affect the overall ranking of my home page or other pages which are rich in content?

    Or will it be better for google if I i do 410 redirect for those deleted attachment pages. Or i can simply let it be 404 pages

    Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    Hi @pingbara

    When you set the ‘redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself’ to ‘yes’, it’ll create a 301 redirect from the attachment page to the file URL itself, so there’s no need for you to worry about 404 errors for those attachment pages since they will automatically be redirected.

    Hi @pingbara,

    This thread has been marked as resolved due to a lack of activity.

    You’re always welcome to re-open this topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.

    Thanks for understanding!`

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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