Google Has Started Indexing Lightbox Photos…? Strange

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• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by goldengate415.

Hi –
My site has malware scanning installed and I scanned it again manually – no virus. (Results below).

It seems that the lightbox photos are being turned into virtual pages. Is there something in the theme that would be causing this?
These are “real” pages as evidenced by the fact that you can click on the above link and go to a page with a photo.

I also tried refreshing permalinks but no luck. There have been no new plugins installed.

Thanks
Rob

Scan results:

Site clean (no malware was identified)
To reduce the bandwidth consumption and the amount of HTTP requests sent by your website to the SiteCheck API service this plugin will cache the results of every scan for 1200 seconds. If you want to get fresh results after modifications suggested by the scanner then go to the scanner settings page and click the button in front of the label “Reset sitecheck logs”, then come back to this page and run a new malware scan. Note that SiteCheck may cache the results of the scan as well in its own server and there is no way you can refresh that information from this plugin, in this case you have to be patient.

CLEAN Malware
CLEAN Malicious javascript
JavaScript is a language (code) that can be executed directly by the browser and many other applications that support it (PDF, email readers, etc). Because it is a full programming language executed by the browser, attackers use it heavily to run malicious code from the compromised sites.
CLEAN Malicious iframes
An inline frame (iframe) is used to embed another document within the current HTML document. Because as the definition implies, it allows you to insert another document inside the current HTML page. And the attackers use that feature to insert malicious content into the compromised sites (to redirect to spam, exploit kits, Fake AV, phishing, etc).
CLEAN Suspicious redirections (htaccess)
Conditional redirections are classified differently than the iframe/javascript ones, because they are generally done though the HTTP headers (via .htaccess) to redirect users from certain browsers or locations to malware/malicious locations.
CLEAN Blackhat SEO Spam
CLEAN Anomaly detection

Hi Ismael,

Thanks for the response!! Yes, I have Yoast, and yes, I have always re-directed attachments posts to parent pages / posts, and Yoast confirms with this message in the dashboard:
“As you are redirecting attachment URLs to parent post URLs, these settings will currently only have an effect on unattached media items! So remember: If you change the attachment redirection setting in the future, the below settings will take effect for *all* media items.”

I really think this is something new that is theme related with the last update as I have never seen pages like this before. These are not normal “attachment pages” but rather long URLs that include the lightboxed photos. I remember there was an issue with the Masonry gallery not displaying that the developers patched recently. Is it possible that the patch somehow did this? Just “grasping at straws” here.

The first place to start with this is should pages like the above pages I have linked to on my site even exist? They are not attachment /media pages, they are not real pages, they are something else that seems to be a lightbox photo.

Here is one for your convenience:
http://www.thomashenthorne.com/27-022/

Note that the url is very strange — it’s not a media attachment like this one — note the path:
http://www.thomashenthorne.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Sunset-1.jpg

So what is that first url is the first thing we must ask ourselves in solving this problem, and what is creating it?

Thanks!!!!! (I know this is a tough one, appreciate it…)

Rob

Login info in private content field, thanks for checking on this!

Hi Ismael! Thanks for logging in. I added your code to the robots.txt file but will this work in ursl like:
http://www.thomashenthorne.com/27-022/

Since there is no “attachment id”…?

I don’t see how adding that to robots.txt will prevent indexing of these photo files?

I have been running Enfold for 2 years + and thus just started happening…. isn’t that a clue that something has changed with the theme? I know there are many variables at play.

Thanks,
Rob

Unfortunately, above solution did not work, and Google Index is still filled with them. I have been using Enfold for years and have never had anything like this happen before. I did start linking photos to lightbox and am wondering if somehow that did it?

Here’s a recent fake “page” that’s indexed on my site:

http://www.thomashenthorne.com/493-washington-court-tiburon-1-4/?s=

Thanks for your help!

Ismael noted on the search pages, but what about pages like this:

http://www.thomashenthorne.com/27-022/

That is not a search generated page.

Thank you

Almost a year later and I finally figured this one out, so wanted to post in case others search and run into the same problem. (Also good for the mods to know).

I did not realize I have to “attach” my media file uploads to specific pages and posts. My process is to upload a bunch of pictures to the media area, then add them to posts or pages with ALB. This results in the images being “unattached” to a post, and Yoast SEO does not then know to re-direct Google crawler inquiries to the master post.

(It would be GREAT if Enfold would automatically attach media files to posts / pages when they are imported to those pages,…)

If you want to read more about this issue, go to this link:
https://digwp.com/2012/05/attach-unattached-media-files/

and this link from Yoast:
https://kb.yoast.com/kb/redirect-image-attachment-urls/#not-working

Hope this helps someone else!

Best,
Rob