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Hi. About a week ago we launched a new version of our website. I have changed the entire taxonomy now to make navigation for both the customer and for Google more straightforward, but unfortunately, that means LOTS of redirects – each product and all pages at least once.
Anyway, I know this isn’t a good system, but… I’m using Rank Math’s 404 monitor as a source for redirects that I should be making. First of all, I want to point out that a lot of the 404s are really strange, at least to me. Here is an example:
The reason they are strange is because of the “page/#” that is added at the end. I am guessing that has something to do with the way I used a plugin to allow me not to have to use the word “category” or “shop” in the url. I don’t know. But I’d like to know if the way I’m doing it is working because I seem to be getting 404s that should be redirecting. For instance, the first 404 in the screenshot is “floor-globe-bars/page/1” and I had set up a redirection to “floor-globe-bars/page/*” a couple of days ago. Similarly, the second 404 in the screenshot is “floor-globe-bars/page/2.”1. Is my understanding incorrect that “floor-globe-bars/page/*” should have redirected those? Perhaps there is some delay from when a redirection is posted and when it takes effect?
2. I circled the last 404 in the screenshot to ask another question which is never clear to me no matter how much SEO documentation I read. Should I be using noindex on images, for instance, product images? Some literature suggests noindexing all images, but Rank Math’s SEO scoring seems to indicate that they should be indexed.
3. My third question is about 404s that I have no idea about, like the first four in this screenshot:
Should I just 401 them, including the last 404 which has to do with a payment gateway that we haven’t used in a long time?Sorry for the loaded post, but I stuck in a question or two that I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time.
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Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math today.
Let’s answer all those questions:
– The first one, those URLs with page/1, page/2… are pagination pages. It is used by WordPress to divide a post or page into several subpages or if it is on the blog page, it is used to show older posts. Sometimes you use that function and sometimes you disable it. Could you try to use the following redirection?
– The second one, image files can not be set as no-index in meta robots (in robots.txt could be) since you can’t add meta robots to image files. Usually what is recommended is to set as no-index to the attachments, which are automatically generated pages with just each image you use in your posts. Since they have almost no content (just the image), they are recommended to don’t be indexed. You can set them as no-index by enabling this redirection:
and after than making sure your Media sitemaps is set like this:
– About the third question, yes, you could do what you suggest, since it is not available right now and there are no plans to add it.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
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