Panda Recovery: A Tip.
I’ve been suffering for sometime with lack of Google traffic. Never giving up I recently may have stumbled on the needle in the haystack that I’ve been looking for for over two years. Hope I can spare anyone two years of trying to recover, perhaps someone out there can benefit from what I discovered.
I visted the free web tool at http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ to see when the **algorithm** punished me.
I discover: Panda 28 (4.2) From: Fri Jul 17 2015 From 442 visits to 85 visits on Dec 13. I figured it was time to put a stop to the landslide.
http://www.screencast.com/t/VkPJ3Sec
I did a Google Search for my site as site:mysite.com and discovered many urls being indexed as: mydomain.com/?attachment_id=1202
My first thought was to check Yoast Seo, and the box was checked for “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.”
So why was this happening?
Well, a couple things. I had at least over a hundred images in my Media Gallery that were unattached to a post. It seems when you use the wordpress gallery code, which I did, the images were not being attached to the post. Also, I uploaded many photos to have on deck for future posts. I had posts that I deleted and the images were still running wild. What a mess. So I cleaned up all images. Deleted the images that were not being used and attached images to the respective posts.
Then visited the url removal tool and entered all the urls that had ?attachment_id= to be removed from Google index.
I sure hope this works for me. I feel good about the cleanup. The attachment urls are indeed thin content and I don’t want them indexed. Especially rogue id’s.
Hope this helps someone. I’ll come back and update in the spring and see if we recovered from Panda.
Also, adding 1,000 word articles every week, sometimes twice.
However, I do have a question..
In my wordpress media gallery, the logos I am using for the Newspaper template are showing up as unattached. How do i fix that? I suppose i could set up a redirect from the attachment id page of the logo to the image or home page…
You may also find this article useful, or anybody else reading this thread — old issue, but many folks are not aware of it — and especially if they had a lot of images which are NOT properly redirecting to parent post.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-image-attachment-pages-in-wordpress/
