redirects

Hello again Prabhat,

I have now done a recrawl (no. 7), and I have both good and bad news. Let’s start with the good news.

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1. Seobility Reports a Better Score
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Figure 1 (https://imgur.com/eYnjToE) shows the number for the three last crawls:

– Crawl 5 is before I upgraded to the WP Pro plan and added RankMath;
– Crawl 6 is after I added RankMath, having the switch “Redirect Attachments” on;
– Crawl 7 is done after I turned “Redirect Attachments” off.

In terms of “optimization score”, Seobility now estimates that https://chrisbocay.com is in substantially better shape than before I added RankMath. So if that estimation is a rough estimate of what Google and other search engines think, then it is indeed a very nice situation to be in.

However, I am not entirely sure that this estimation is correct. For SEO tools cannot, in my opinion, know all the inner details of the search engine companies’ algorithms. Furthermore, they may not consider all the “quirks” and idiosyncrasies of particular CMSs (such as WordPress). [Unless the SEO tool is customized for a particular CMSs, as RankMath is.]

In any case, now to the actual results.

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2. The Effects of Switching Off “Redirect Attachments”
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In Figure 2 (https://imgur.com/ybbZ11n) you can see some of the effects of that I switched off the “Redirect Attachments” function.

First, on the very top, the blue arrow indicates that after crawl 6, there was a fourth row on top, which was also red, which had the text “More than 50% of all crawled URLs redirect to another page. Total found 172 redirects. This affects search engine bots negatively when crawling your website.”

So that fourth row is now gone, and I estimate that this was the main reason for that the “Structure” aspect of the Seobility score now recovered since crawl 6 (see Figure 1).

Also in Figure 2 we can see that the number of redirects is only 3, but that its value has declined with 169 since crawl 6. So the overwhelming majority of the redirects automatically installed by RankMath using the function “Redirect Attachments” are now gone.

If I remember correctly, I think I had 2 redirects here after crawl 5. So my memory of it is that RankMath increased that number with 170, thus adding up to 172 after crawl 6. So which one did not get removed?

Before I go on answering that question, I would like to add, in passing, that the approx 30 custom redirection links that I myself installed with RankMath are not listed. This is presumably so because the source links that I use to redirect FROM do not longer exist (for example I deleted posts and recreated them as pages instead, so their original URL is found nowhere on my site).

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3. The Three Remaining Redirects
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Let’s now look at Figure 3 (https://imgur.com/YQz5ytq). This is the “Redirects” view in Seobility. And here we can see the details of the three redirect items that we discovered in Figure 2 above.

Now, since I am new to Seobility myself, I am not sure exactly how this Redirects view works. So in item 1, for example, it seems as if there is a redirect from “0107-book-review-rating-…” to my home page. And in the second column (“Pages that link to a redirect”), the page “https://chrisbocay.com/image-sitemap-1.xml” is listed there presumably because it contains a link to the “0107-book-review-rating-…” page.

What complicates this issue is that I deleted the “book review rating” pic yesterday. So I cannot find that link in “https://chrisbocay.com/image-sitemap-1.xml” as of now, because the image sitemap presumably updated itself after that (which is why the image sitemap now only contains 221 items instead of 222). But I take it that it was there until I deleted it.

So this link, I think, is the “missing link” that RankMath created.

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4. The New Sitemaps Uploaded to GSC Without My Knowledge
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Whatever the case may be it seems that it is connected to the image-sitemap-1.xml document. This file I haven’t seen before I installed RankMath, or before I got my WordPress Pro plan.

For, as seen in Figure 4 (https://imgur.com/5qfM7J1), it seems that somewhere along the way, Google Search Console now uses an “image sitemap” instead of a “news-sitemap” (as it did before). For I have not manually added that image sitemap in Google Search Console. And I think the regular (post+page) sitemap now also has another name than before. These just appeared as a “surprise” yesterday or the day before. Perhaps because of my upgrade to the WP Pro plan, just prior to adding RankMath.

https://chrisbocay.com/image-sitemap-1.xml
https://chrisbocay.com/sitemap-1.xml

In any case, what is of concern here is the number “222” as seen in the Google Search Console picture (and in https://chrisbocay.com/image-sitemap-1.xml, where it is 221). Where do these 222 new image URLs come from? Why didn’t Google find these before, WITHOUT the sitemap? Isn’t that what crawling is for?

Or did those image pages simply not EXIST before on my site? Maybe Jetpack created these 222 pages as a result of the new “image sitemap” initiative, or of my Pro plan upgrade? Or perhaps RankMath created these 222 pages as a result of the “Redirect Attachments” process? I don’t know. It’s a mess.

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5. More than Twice the Number of URLs on My Site Overnight
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In any case, I am now left with Seobility’s overall report, which is seen in Figure 5 (https://imgur.com/Yacdwgh). Here we see that in crawl 5, which was before I started my Pro Plan, and before I installed RankMath, Seobility downloaded only 159 pages from my site. Presumably because there *were* no more pages to download. But starting with crawl 6, that number has skyrocketed to 334.

The upshot of this is that, most probably, my Seobility crawl budget now effectively has been more than halved, since I now have more than double the number of pages to crawl compared to previously.

And all these new pages seem also not to ADD anything in terms of SEO, but rather to detract from it. For if these are “thin” content pages, how will Google react to them, and to my “real” pages?

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6. What to Do?
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So my desire, I guess, is to remove these 222 new pages somehow. But how?

Or should I simply leave everything as it is? Should I perhaps replace the Jetpack sitemaps with yours instead? Would that change anything?

I would be most grateful for your expertise and input.

Best wishes!!
Chris

Hello Prabhat,

Thank you very much for your answer! Everything gradually becomes clearer and clearer!

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1. Redirects
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> A high number of redirects, if implemented correctly,
> does not negatively affect the website’s SEO, rather,
> the site could benefit from it.

So you’re saying that Seobility’s SEO warning (“More than 50% of all crawled URLs…”) is not applicable in this special case, with WordPress.com and their attachment pages, and with my particular number of files (approx 150 posts and pages; approx 220 images)?

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2A. Why Only 170 Redirects?
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Now that I know more about WP and its way of dealing with images (due to information provided by your support and by WordPress support), I am now posing the following question:

In my original installation of RankMath, when I had the option “Redirect Attachments” enabled, RankMath only redirected 170 pages. Why is that?

For it seems that, for each image in the database, there exists one attachment page as well. So since I have 220+ images, I should also have 220+ image attachment pages.

So why did RankMath only redirect 170 of these attachment pages, leaving 50 of them NOT redircted? That is one question I would like to know the answer to.

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2B. The 50 Non-Redirected Image Attachment Pages
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Another interesting and supposedly relevant observation is that when I list all my files in the List View in the Media Library, some images are categorized as “unattached”, while others are “attached”, as seen in Fig 10 (https://imgur.com/Y1SbLw4).

Curiously enough, when I count my images according to these two categories, I find the following:

Total no of images in the list: 224
No of unattached images: 172
No of attached images: 52

Thus, it seems that RankMath, somehow or other, only redirected those images that are categorized as “unattached”, while doing nothing in relation to those images that are categorized as “attached”.

So why is that? I mean, the 52 images which are categorized as “attached” all have an attachment page as well. So why is it that those 52 attachment pages were not redirected?

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3. Sitemaps from Different Plugins
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> It is not recommended to use multiple plugins
> generating the sitemaps as this might result in conflicts.

It was my impression that I somehow ONLY used Jetpack’s sitemaps (I don’t think I have seen any on/off switch control for RankMath’s sitemaps. Is there one?).

In Google Search Central and Bing I have previously, a long time ago, uploaded the “default” WordPress.com sitemaps. So there I currently have only the Jetpack sitemaps (and RankMath’s sitemaps have not been automatically uploaded there).

And in Seobility I haven’t specified any specific sitemap explicitly, so it seems it’s using Jetpack’s sitemap.xml file instead of RankMath’s.

My plan is, of course, to switch out Jetpack’s sitemaps, and use RankMath’s instead.

The question is, though, are you also suggesting that I disable the Jetpack plugin as a WHOLE? Are you saying that the RankMath and Jetpack plugins should not be activated simultaneously? Or are you suggesting that I *only* switch off the “sitemap” feature in Jetpack, and leave Jetpack otherwise on?

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4. Having ONLY RankMath sitemaps activated
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Fig 9 (https://imgur.com/IsdQfW6) shows the Jetpack controls for sitemaps. Is it enough for me just to disable the “Generate XML Sitemaps” alternative there, to make RankMath become the only provider of XML sitemaps?

And does RankMath then, like Jetpack, also *automatically* submit its sitemaps to the search engines? Or is it more of a “static” feature, whereby the sitemaps are generated on the site, but not “pinged” to Google, Bing, etc.?

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5. The Alternative “Images in Sitemaps”
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Another question is in regard to Fig. 8 (https://imgur.com/RcOnfOZ). Are you saying that it is always preferable to have the alternative “Images in Sitemaps” enabled? (Currently I have it off.)

If that is what you are suggesting, why is it preferable?

Best wishes!!
Chris Bocay

Hello Jaideep,

Thank you very much for your nice answer. I think this sounds very promising, and I will now go ahead and switch off Jetpack’s sitemaps, and once again enable the Redirect Attachments option.

Hoping that you and your team will have a GREAT day!
Chris Bocay