Strange Google Search Results With My New WordPress Site
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@bdukes – Thanks for getting back to me. All I have referenced above is not about duplicate content. It’s about wordpress automatically creating pages that are thin/weak and poor content which can lead Google to think my website is a spammy site and our a content farm site. With the wordpress default of creating attachment pages for all images it is creating a scenario where you have a lot more pages on your site that have zero content then pages that actually have lovingly crafted and useful content that Google prefers. It would be very easy for wordpress to set as a default “noindex” for these pages with NO content.
I thought this article excerpt really explains it very well:
check this article:
http://www.ampercent.com/prevent-indexing-wordpress-image-attachment-pages/9082/excerpt 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 !”
I have spent a lot of time and effort already transferring form a self-hosted website to a wordpress site because I saw many benefits to working with a wordpress site. Mainly ease of use and editing. I really do not want to go through the entire transfer process again.
This seems like a very easy fix that wordpress could do to offer a better service for all those wordpress.com bloggers out there.
There is no reason to have hundreds and thousands of pages created with absolutely no content for google to index.
Tony
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OK – Finally!!! I have been so focused an worrying about all these image attachment pages producing useless “no-content” pages that i have not thought of making the best of them and utilizing them as an SEO plus. I finally found an article that clearly explains this. Whew! Feeling a lot better now! Now to work on crafting good image titles, captions and descriptions, then all of these attachment pages will no longer be useless and damaging :-)
An Introduction To WordPress Attachment Pages
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/wordpress-attachment-pages/ -
I have been putting relevant captions and titles on all my images for some time, so this is mostly a false alarm about how WordPress works if good SEO practices as recommended many times in the forum are used
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Well I know about this now. But when I jumped into wordpress I had NO CLUE about these image attachment pages until I noticed that Google was actually indexing these pages I have no clue about. Normally and image file is an image file, you upload it place it in your page and add some alt text and that’s it.
But now knowing that wordpress is actually creating a page for every single image uploaded AND that Google is actually indexing these pages…. , well that is a completely different story and now all of a sudden the image files and how you manage them becomes huge!
So now I have to go back and edit the 1,000’s of photos I have already uploaded! Will be a daunting task but worth it in the end. Just wish I knew about it as I was going in with the knew site.
I have been designing websites since 1998 and all of them have been self hosted on webhosting servers that I managed.
Template design is new to me and this “image attachment page” thing is an entirely new concept to me that I knew nothing about. So I am learning the hard way.
There should be a big warning for those new to WordPress.
“Warning! Wordpess creates separate pages for every single image file you upland to your site AND Google will index these pages, so you better take the time to add Titles, Captions and Descriptions….”
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@auxclass – Question for you since you have been putting relevant captions and titles on all my images for some time. Now that I am going back through all my photos and working on proper description, I have a question.
I will use this particular attachment page as an example:
So for the image descriptions I have four options:
title / caption / alternative text / description
I notice the title and caption text shows up as visible text on the attachment page and that is what I will be working on for the Googlebots to pick up when they index.
But what about the Alternative Text and Description
Is the alternative text just alt-text, text that shows up on the photo when you hover over it?
And what does the description actually do? Where does it show up. If I put some text in the description, that does not visibly show up on the attachment page. Is this just behind the scenes text for search engines? Something else?
Thanks for the help. I am learning :-)
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Pardon my very bad memory on what is what
I think Alt Text is for search engines only and never shows on your site but is visible to search engines – I have used that feature a couple of times – interesting actually – an image and Post searches high on the text but there is nothing showing up to indicate how the search engine indexed the images – in one case I used it to help push down an article about her and a toilet when she was on a ski vacation – why Google indexed the toilet highly is unknown – but it did help a bit
I think search engines look at captions then Description in case the caption is missing – I usually fill in most of the blanks now – – I use pictures to add to a Post – many how to do something (tie a knot or cleat for instance) – so I try and guess a good search term and put it in the caption and description –
@raincoaster had a nice article some time back on SEO stuff that helped
Maybe @bdukes has a link to the support section on what each item does
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Maybe a small fix that might not be too bad would be to use the Alt Text part and just put the name of the dish in the Aux Text – that would give search engines something to index and the alt text could be the same “spaghetti” for instance
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Thanks, this is a bit clearer. Still a bit of a mystery what the “description” field is actually for?
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This has a bit more info on what displays when: https://en.support.wordpress.com/images/image-settings/
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You be welcome & good luck
With careful captions and such I have found that some of my Posts search very well against larger and older sites – when given lemons – add captions & such :)
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That was a helpful article. Still not so sure about the description field. This is what that article says about it:
Description is an optional description of the image that will display on the image’s attachment page (if you choose for the image to be linked to its attachment page).
But I have tried it and still, really what is only showing up visibly on the attachment page is the title and caption.
So not really sure the description field is necessary but I can’t tell for sure.
It’s clear as mud.
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So I am making some headway here :-)
Go here:
once there, click on the photo of me a s a kid with a bowtie on with my family. (I have that image set to “link to attachment page”)
That takes you to the attachment page.
So in the media library I have this images edited as follows:
title: growing up Italian in america
Caption: This is a photo of my family with my Italian grandparents on my moms side. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house when I was a kid and spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my Italian grandma learning about cooking and mainly about how to pour love into the cooking. Cooking for her family is how my grandma Salerno shared love. She took great pride in her cooking and she was happiest when someone was enjoying the feast she prepared for those she loved! Yeah, that’s me on the right with the bowtie long ago and far away!
Alternative text: Me, my mom and grandparents. The Italian side of the family.
Description: This is a photo of me when I was about 8 years old I think? That’s me on the right with the bowtie.
So as you can see in the attachment page the only thing really visibly showing up is:
Title and Caption
The description field is doing nothing.
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Hi Tony,
To give you more background on “Description” it will depend on what theme you are using if this will show on the attachment page. Your current theme, Chronicle does not show this field on the Attachment page. However, many other themes do.
As this field is optional it’s up to you if you want to fill it out for if/when you switch themes to one that supports both caption and description.
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@ removearticle,
Hi, againI don’t have a page with this name. I do have an image with the name “sausage-bread-mid-banner”.
I haven’t read the entire thread but the issue regarding the mystery page, and not certain if this issue was resolved. FWIW, here’s my summary:
From website URL, to page URL, to the attachment page, http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/sausage-bread-recipe/sausage-bread-mid-banner/, we have a series of extensions. The media file, https://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/sausage-bread-mid-banner.jpg, is what you would see if the image in the page were linked to “media file” instead of “attachment page,” at image details.
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Correction:
I haven’t read the entire thread, and I’m not certain if this issue was resolved.
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Well, the sausage bread example is a bad example now because I changed the main recipe photo.
This is a better example:
http://spaghettisauceandmeatballs.com/growing-up-italian-in-america/the main family photo on top right with me in the bowtie. That image is set to “link to attachment page” and I have added all the descriptive text I want to satisfy me that the attachment page is no longer a useless page. :-)
I just have to do this with 1,000+ more image files now….
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yes, it was resolved and i am quite happy other than the fact i have to go back through 1,000+ image files and correct everything…
Oh well, I have learned all of this the hard way.
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hello i created a website few days ago and today i googled my website in search engine but the result was unexpected title of my website is something like this “Geekme – Android Geek Hub – inne’s blog”
But my sites name is geekme what is the possible cause for this can any one tell me…is my site is hacked..??
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