Strange Google Search Results With My New WordPress Site
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This is very strange indeed and makes no sense. i don’t know if this is a WordPress.com thing or Google being very confused…..?
A google search for “SAUSAGE BREAD RECIPE” has very strange results!
This search phrase brings up this result:
sausage bread | Anthony’s Italian Recipes
spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid
‘sausage bread’. Published July 3, 2015 at 650 × 349 in Sausage Bread Recipe · sausage bread · ‹ Return to post · Sausage Bread …
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/—
I don’t have a page with this name. I do have an image with the name “sausage-bread-mid-banner“.
but that should be:
https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/sausage-bread-mid-banner.jpg, not a page address: http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/What’s going on?
This is very strange behavior for google to index a page that never existed.
Is Google misunderstanding WordPress?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I should add this to clarify:
Google sees this as a page:
That does not and never has existed as a page.
The page I do have is:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/I do have an image file with this address:
https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/sausage-bread-mid-banner.jpgGoogle is confused and trying to see that image file name as a page url address.
Very messed up.
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Also happening with another page. Google is seeing the name of my images on word press and making it an actual url address
Exmple:
In search result:
This page does now exist. However I do have a jpg file called:
italian-bread-mid-banner.jpg
Google is seeing that image file and making it an actual page url of:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/italian-bread-recipe/italian-bread-mid-banner/This is very bad for SEo. What the heck is going on?
Is wordpress confusing Google bots?
This is messed up.
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You said you have a new site – it can take several weeks for a new site to be fully indexed by search engines
Whats so bad about the SEO? The page exists, a picture of something, no 404 error – not every search link goes where you might want it. The more results that are returned for your site the better. I have lots of search results that are for pictures that were not a Post or Page by themselves, but were part of a larger article
See below for more help
Search Engines and Building Traffic
http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/seo-and-your-blog/The folks at WordPress.com have written an e-book about it! http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/grow-traffic-ebook/
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No, the page does not exist:
This is the page that I created and the page that exists:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/italian-bread-recipe/Google indexing is seeing my image file name and seeing that as an actual URL address that does not existing which produces a 404 page not found error. I would not say the more links back to your site the better. That is an error link.
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I’ve been doing some reading about this:
How to Stop Google from Indexing your WordPress Image Attachment PagesAlso been reading this can really hurt your site in regards to rankings. Google should not be trying to create a url page address that does not exist.
Ugh, nightmare it seems…..
OK – really this is driving me crazy!~
So after I have inserted an image to my page, if I click in the and then click the edit icon I see I have options for this image in regards to “link to”
Could this be my problem?
At present I have my images set to “link to media file”
This is default setting. Should I be setting it to “link to none” ?Do you think that might help?
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What I have been reading is if Google is seeing an image as a page it can hurt your site. Here is why. Good article:
check this article:
http://www.ampercent.com/prevent-indexing-wordpress-image-attachment-pages/9082/exceprt from this article:
“How The Image Attachment Page Of WordPress Might Hurt Your Site”
Google has recently tightened it’s grips on spam sites who plagiarize content from genuine sources or do not produce original content on their own. The current buzz word is “Content farm” and if your site has a lot of unnecessary pages with practically no content in them – your site might be accidentally sending “Content farm signals” to the Googlebot.
Furthermore, linking to images from the actual post will allow the Googlebot to crawl those attachment pages and will dilute the Google juice flowing through the actual content pages. If you populate Google’s web index with “content-less” pages, your site may get flagged as a content mill.
Recently, while checking through the error reports of Google webmaster tools, I found that a lot of these image attachment pages were indexed. Checking through the source code of these image attachment pages, I found that they are not Noindexed.
This is a serious SEO blunder !”
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Going to experiment. From reading that article I note above. it seems that “linking to an image” is what might be causing the problem with google crawling and trying to create a page for the image. Which is a page with no content and is NOT good for seo.
So I am going to set my images to “link to none”. In theory it seems this might correct the problem.
Can anybody verify that hypothesis?
Although it does seem wordrpess’ default is “link to media file”. I might just have to go back through a bunch of pages and edit ALL my images to “Link to none”.
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I do now see a page at: http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/ which means you may have created the page after posting this thread.
Regardless, we have no control over how Google indexes your site. I do see you have Google Search Console (formally Webmaster Tools) set up which gives you some control over how Google indexes your site.
Typically with cases where a link is returning a 404 page the search engine will remove that page from the index. This does not hurt your total search engine optimization.
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This:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/
is- NOT
a page I created. It’s a page wordpress automatically created because I added an image to the page I created. And the image was set as a default to “link to media”. If you look at the result of this page that wordpress automatically created:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/
You will see this message:‘sausage bread’
PUBLISHED JULY 3, 2015 AT 650 × 349 IN SAUSAGE BREAD RECIPEIt’s talking about an image file that is 650×349 in size and it was an image file that I added to the page I created. But it is creating an entirely new page just to mention the image.
Notice it says “published in sausage bread”. Sausage bread is the page I created.
“sausage-bread-mid-banner.jpg” is an image I added to the page. WordPress automatically creates a page with zero content just for the image. That is definitely not desirable and is bad SEO practice.Also if I go to WP Admin and then pages, this automatically created page just for the image file:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/is not listed in the pages I created.
WordPress is creating automatic pages for ALL the images I am adding to my pages…. :-(
It’s automatically creating pages using the names of image files I add to my pages. This is crazy and is resulting in a LOT of pages with NO content. Really makes no sense and should not be doing that.
I am hoping that going back through all photos and editing the images to “link to none” in lieu of wordpress’ default of “link to madia” will fix this. But that is a horrible default. The default should be “link to none”.
We shall see how it goes. This will take time now because google has already indexed all those automatically created image page. ugh. Anyway, I am going to change ALL image settings to “link to none” and then wait again for Google to pick up all those changes.
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OK, sorry to be a pain about this but I feel this is a very important issue to correct.
So I will use this page that I did create as an example:
On this page I have a main image of some yummy Italian bread that I lovingly made by hand. The name of this image file is:
italian-bread-mid-banner.jpg
and has this path on the wordpress server:
The page for this image that wordpress is automatically creating is:
As you can see, wordpress is using the image file name to make a new page.
code when image is set to: “link to none”
<img class="alignnone wp-image-619 size-full" style="border: 2px solid #9c0505;" title="Italian Bread" src="https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/italian-bread-mid-banner.jpg" alt="Italian bread" width="650" height="401" />code when image is set to: “link to media” (wordpress default)
<a href="https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/italian-bread-mid-banner.jpg"><img class="alignnone wp-image-619 size-full" style="border: 2px solid #9c0505;" title="Italian Bread" src="https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/italian-bread-mid-banner.jpg" alt="Italian bread" width="650" height="401" />So when the image is set to: “link to media” it creates an a href= which actually links to the image. For this to happen, it actually creates a new page for the image using the image name for the new page name.
AND this new page it creates does not show up in my admin area which shows all the pages I have created.
So is creating the new image pages on the fly? It must be. Dynamically created pages.
Google sees this image page with zero content as a valid page and indexes it.
Google is doing nothing wrong, it is seeing a page and it is indexing it.
WordPress is in the wrong for automatically creating these pages. At least is should be adding a noindex in the code for the automatically created page.
This:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/italian-bread-recipe/italian-bread-mid-banner/
is a useless page that serves no purpose and I would never create such a page willingly. Especially such a page for Google to index.Really hoping I can get this fixed.
Can somebody please verify that if i edit the images and set them to “link to none” that this would stop WordPress from automatically creating separate pages just for an image file?
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Woops, wish this furom allowed you to edit your post after posting. Anyway. error in post above.
I meant to say I am using this page as an example:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/italian-bread-recipe/not the sausage bread page, although is doing the same thing there as well.
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This is happening on ALL images:
another example:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/homemade-ravioli-recipe/ravioli-mid-banner/All I have to do is get the name of any image on a page and put that image name in as a url address and there is a page for that image. ugh.
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I have been doing a lot of research on this. I am not the only one concerned with this problem. There are endless links to articles asking How to Disable Image Attachment Pages in WordPress! Unfortunately they are all for wordpress.org. But is the same problem we are talking about here as well on wordpress.com. WordPress creating attachment pages for all images. :-(
Surely there is a way to make wordpress stop doing this very unnecessary practice of creating attachment pages for all images.
At least give us the option to say no, we don’t want you to do that.
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One more thing and I will stop until hopefully someone can offer some solutions….. The problem is definitely WordPress creating attachment pages for ALL images :-(
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OK – one more important thing I have just noticed. If I go into my media library and click on any one of the humndfreds of images I have uplaoded. I have options for the image itself. In those options there are three links at the bottom fo option area:
View attachment page | Edit more details | Delete Permanently
The “View attachment page” actually let’s you see the stupid page it is creating for the image. Each and every image on my site!
This would normally not be a problem, but the BIG problem is google is indexing ALL of these pages!!!!!!
All wordpress would have to do and what they should be doing is adding the “noindex” tag to these automatically cerated pages:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">That’s it,. That one little bit of added code on these attachment pages would correct the problem instantly.
Can somebody share this with those in charge of wordpress?
How can I change this? This is not needed and is damaging for search results. Google does not like pages with NO content. Especially if you end up with more no-content pages than you have pages with content. It dilutes the content of the overall site!
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This article also explains the problem with this well and offers a “slight” solution but again is only acheived through the use of plug-ins with wordpress.org.
http://www.bloggingguts.com/stop-google-indexing-wordpress-attachment-page/
very sad.
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Well, this just keeps getting worse. These attachment pages created for all images also have the option for people to leave comments. This is a huge backdoor for people to spam the site.
ugh.
I was really loving WordPress until discovering this attachment page issue.
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re: disabling comments on attachment pages in as WordPress.COM hosted blog
Does this help?
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/how-to-turn-off-comment-and-reblog-options-in-photo-gallery?replies=11#post-1792877 -
@timethief Thanks, but no, that does not help. The only way to stop commenting on image attachment pages is to turn off commenting for your entire site. I want commenting on my legitimate pages that I created, I just don’t want these dumb automatically created attachment pages and comment options on those.
I am going to go through ALL my images and change display setting to “link to none” with hopes that, that might stop the creation of attachment pages altogether.
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Okay and re: “link to none” see https://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/images-the-three-link-options/
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@timethief – Thanks, I already know about those settings. I jsut don’t know for sure if setting the images to “link to none” is going to stop the creation of attachment pages.
Also the article says this:
“The default is “None”: if you prefer one of the other options, you’ll have to click the relevant tab. The tool will remember your last choice, so you only have to do this once (as long as you don’t want a different option in another post or page).”
That is incorrect. Try it yourself. When you’re in a post and click on add media and then upload a file, you will see that the default setting is “link to media”. I wish I had known this before I uploaded hundreds of images to the site :-(
So, going back and changing all those images now.
I just have to remember from this point on when I add photos I need to change the default setting of “link to media” to “link to none”.
And it also might be too late because all those pages have already been created and google has already indexed them all. I do not know yet.
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Hi Anthony,
Thanks for all your feedback. While we do look at search engine optimization at this time there are currently no plans to allow users to turn off the attachment pages or add “no index” to them. Google and other search engines are getting better at indexing sites. We find that having the archive pages does not hurt your search rankings as Google does not see them as duplicate content nor are you penalized. This may have been true a few years ago but it is no longer the case.
If this is a feature you must have then you may wish to conceder self-hosting your WordPress site.
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