How to make image ads (used in post templates) “nofollow” for SEO?

Hi,
We are using the Newspaper theme and placing image ads (with links) inside the post templates – so they appear in every post.
The problem is that these linked images get indexed in every article and may negatively affect SEO (duplicate external links from every post).

The link already has rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer” – but the image itself is still treated as part of the content.
Is there a built-in way in the theme to handle these ad images differently – for example, prevent them from being indexed or styled as ad-only content?

Thanks in advance!

In olden days you could remove those from search console, but who knows if that even works now that Google truly doesn’t give a shite and is focused on AI vs actual site endpoints.

I know on one site, years back, we did a trick of putting a robots txt no index file in the separate images folder for ads (e.g., mysite.ooo/ads/ads1234.jpg — *not* /wp-uploads/ad1234.jpg

I think were able to block googlebot from loading the images there. No idea if that still works.
(I don’t work here.)

• This reply was modified 1 year by simchris.

Hi,
Thank you!

Can you share idea how to set rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer” for image in image ad section?

BR, Aldis

Hi,

Thank you!

Yes, chat gpt suggested this as one of the option to solve this image indexing problem, but I am interested maybe theme developers have same more native solution.

BR, Aldis