Irrelevant Google results

Hello @soulmama

Thanks for reaching out about the unwanted search results.

Adding noindex tags is recommended for content that you do not want to appear in search results. Of course, your friend’s photos will remain on your website but won’t show up when she Google’s her name.

However, this cannot be done via the Yoast SEO plugin since WordPress does not serve media files. Please consider using the X-Robots-Tag. We have an article explaining this tag and some examples of how to use it to ensure that the media files don’t get indexed. You can find the article here — https://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/

You may also want to consider taking a look at this documentation from Google on how to discourage or disallow images from being indexed using the robots.txt file — https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/prevent-images-on-your-page

Hmm, well, I do want my media files, including those with her name to be indexed and to appear. But how does the indexing work – when with her name totally unrelated media files from my website pops up?

@soulmama Thanks for your reply.

Regarding your question, can you determine whether the unrelated media files that are appearing when you perform a search of her name are ones that also appear on the page of your site where her name is mentioned?

Also, could you please provide a link to the page of your site where her name is mentioned so that we can try to determine why the other images are being associated? If you don’t want to provide a hyperlink or URL directly in the message, feel free to take a screenshot of the URL and then upload it to an image sharing site, and then just include the image URL in your reply.

In addition, we do certainly understand that you want your site’s images to be indexed and are trying to understand and resolve this issue rather than setting images to noindex. We would need to try to figure out how the unrelated images are being associated with her though to advise that, which is why we are requesting the aforementioned information.

Hi,

thanks for getting back to me.

Her name appears for example on this page; https://www.soulmamaarts.com/utstallningar-exhibitions-events/

and maybe a couple others where I have my portfolio with these photos.

But the other hits when googling her name are pages from my old blog posts, so media/photos and pages that are like 5 years old. The only thing I can gather is “the same” is the fact that they are media files on my site… The results aren’t also “all” of my posts, just seems to be random blog posts – also no similar names or anything are mentioned in these old posts.

@soulmama Thanks for your reply.

I first checked in a Google image search here using her only her name, but I didn’t initially see any images that were from your site and unrelated to her work.

To try and narrow this further, I also tried a site specific image search of site:soulmamaarts.com UTVALDA UTST?LLNINGAR here and again I’m not seeing any images listed in the results (see image here).

Would you please be able to provide a screenshot of which images you are referring to that are not relevant in a search of her, and provide the query that they are appearing in for Google search?

Hi again!

Here are my results with her name. When she googled it was similar. I marked several ooold blog posts of mine.

https://www.soulmamaarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/googleresults.jpg