MLA no image attachments in sitemap

Thanks for your question and for mentioning Yoast in your description of the issue. You may find this earlier topic of interest:

MLA Conflicts with Yoast SEO Sitemap

You might try the example plugin developed for that topic and see if it improves your results. To get the example plugin, navigate to the Settings/Media library Assistant Documentation tab and click the “Example Plugins” button. Type “yoast” in the text box and click “Search Plugins” to filter the table.

You are looking for “MLA Yoast SEO Example” plugin. Find that plugin and hover over the title in the left-most column. Click the “Install” (or “Update”) rollover action, then go to the WordPress Plugins/Installed Plugins submenu and activate the example plugin as you would any other plugin.

It would be great if you try the plugin and let me know how it works for your application. I will leave this topic unresolved until I hear back from you. Thanks for your interest in MLA.

I will do that as soon as i can and report back. I have found MLA most helpful getting as far as it did. No other plugin for wordpress, I have found, does this function and then there’s the millions of photographers that think those tags end up in search.
If successful, perhaps a plugin or more direct instructions will expand your world supremacy converting meta into searchable text.
Best Wishes

to be continued…………….

Well………………….
found the yoast sample and installed it.
tried to generate a new rule, not successfully.
reran the images through the mla interface. No image information was added.
with yoast it is not possible to force a sitemap rebuild, upon inspection no changes or additions.

No Joy.
cheers

Thanks for your update and for taking the time to install and test the example plugin. Perhaps I have not understood the specifics of your issue. Here are the initial steps of my own investigation:

1. I installed Yoast SEO version 4.6 and MLA Yoast SEO Example version 1.10 on my test system.
2. I navigated to the SEO/XML Sitemaps admin screen.
3. I clicked on the “XML Sitemap” link in the Your XML Sitemap section.
4. I inspected the content of the post-sitemap.xml, page-sitemap.xml and attachment-sitemap.xml files.

The sitemaps contain many entries like this one:

		<loc>https://l.mlabeta/data-sources-in-item-markup/</loc>
		<lastmod>2014-04-08T11:23:23-07:00</lastmod>
		<image:image>
			<image:loc>https://l.mlabeta/wp-content/plugins/media-library-assistant/images/crystal/audio.png</image:loc>
			<image:caption><![CDATA[Kislev Meditation]]></image:caption>
		</image:image>

These entries are generated by the wpseo_sitemap_urlimages filter in the example plugin. On my system, things are working as expected.

In you first post you wrote “ … the sitemap generated contains no attached images.” Can you tell me which sitemap you are looking at and how you got to it?

In your most recent post you wrote “tried to generate a new rule, not successfully.” Can you give me more details on what that means?

In your most recent post you wrote “reran the images through the mla interface.” Can you give me more details on what that means?

The example plugin installs a filter that runs whenever Yoast SEO generates a sitemap. No rules or other MLA processing is required. I suspect I do not understand what you meant when you wrote “My goal is to move the image and the keyword(s) into a search recognized location for the sitemap to pick up.” If you can provide more details I can give you more specific help. Thanks!

I am including screen grabs of my sitemaps and pertinent settings. I have not been able to recreate your steps and find no settings that align with your information.

here is the link for the SEO sitemaps generated by yoast. the alt category and alt tags show up in media library assistant, but no images show up as linked in the sitemaps.

https://piethalberstadt(dot)com/mla-screen-grabs/

Thanks for your quick response and for the screen grabs; very helpful. I regret that my description of the steps I followed was unclear.

The “XML Sitemap” link and the “Your XML Sitemap” section appear on the General tab of the “XML Sitemaps – Yoast SEO” screen. This is the first tab on the same screen as the “Taxonomies sitemap settings” you show in a screen grab.

To “inspect” a sitemap I right-clicked on its link in the “XML Sitemap” page and then saved the XML file to my local system. I used Dreamweaver to look at the raw XML in the file. If you just click on the link it displays in the browser; the XML in the file is processed by the browser and the “raw” XML is not shown.

In any case your post gives me a better understanding of the results you are looking for. The current version of the MLA Yoast SEO Example plugin does one specific task. It looks in each post and page for one or more [mla_gallery] shortcodes and adds SEO entries for each item displayed by the shortcode(s). It does not make any improvements to the “taxonomy” sitemaps for Att. Categories or Att. Tags.

The “taxonomy” sitemaps correspond to the WordPress taxonomy archive pages, e.g., the posts assigned to a specific Category or Tag term. These archive pages specifically exclude attachments, so accessing a URL such as your https://piethalberstadt(dot)com/attachment_tag/advertising/ entry will display something like “no items found”. This is a very common issue, as raised in this recent topic:

No Posts for Archive Pages Att. Tags & Att. Categories

Have you made some modifications to your site’s archive pages to display attachments in the archive pages?

Now that I understand your goal I can modify the example plugin to add image information to the taxonomy sitemap pages. However, it may not help you if the corresponding archive pages on your site do not display the images when they are accessed. Let me know if this makes sense and how you would like to proceed.

thank you for YOUR quick reply.
I have made no alterations to the site other than plugins. No changes to any php by me.
The goal is to integrate the image IPTC keywords into an area of wordpress from which search engines can read the keywords from alt tags or alt category and locate and display the image rather than a 404 response.
it seems to me ( I produce the content, not the code– makes my head spin) the end result would link keywords generated prior to uploading into wordpress and the image attachment page for search engines to find. So far the alt tag/category gets part way and now the linking to image is next. This would be a huge step for photographers trying to get found and you would become a worldwide hero.
thank you.

Now we’re making progress! You wrote:

The goal is to integrate the image IPTC keywords into an area of wordpress from which search engines can read the keywords from alt tags or alt category and locate and display the image rather than a 404 response.

You also mentioned “the image attachment page“, which suggests adding the keyword information to the Media page for each Media Library item. Search engines can crawl the Media pages and they can be used to display an image. Does your site provide for viewing the Media pages?

The XML Sitemaps in your screen grabs do not include the “attachment-sitemap.xml” entry. You can activate that by going to the “Post Types” tab in the XML Sitemaps – Yoast SEO screen and setting the Media option to “In sitemap”. That will produce the entry you need. The goal now becomes adding the keyword information to that sitemap AND to the attachment page itself.

Yoast SEO and other plugins add <meta > tags to the <head> portion of each HTML page. Here is an old topic that goes into more detail:

Pull Featured Image from MLA Gallery

The solution for that topic was adding a bit of code to the site’s theme that added the <meta > tags to each post/page in a similar way that the example plugin adds them to the sitemap. It does not specifically add keywords, however.

A quick fix might be to add the keywords to the “Meta description template” for Media items:

1. Go to the Titles & Metas – Yoast SEO screen
2. Click the Post Types tab
3. Scroll down to the Media post type
4. Fill in the Meta description template with something like the following:

%%ct_attachment-category%% %%sep%% %%ct_attachment_tag%%

When I tried that I got the Att. Category and Att. Tag terms in the <meta description=> tag. Would that work for your site?

The standard WordPress Category and Tag terms show up in the <head> section as:

<meta content="A Category" property="article:section">
<meta content="A Tag" property="article:tag">

I could not find a plugin setting to generate similar meta tags for the Att. taxonomies, but it’s possible that these could be added by some additional code in the example plugin. Let me know if this explanation is helpful and if you’re interested in trying an enhanced example plugin. Thanks for a stimulating topic!

I did a bit more research on sitemaps, e.g.,

Sitemaps XML format

Image sitemaps

It looks like sitemaps do not support adding information like keywords and descriptions. They are a simple index of the URLs for your site. The sitemap user, e.g., a search engine, uses the URLs to crawl the site and analyze the content. Therefore, adding the <meta > tags to the site content is the desired solution.

So far MLA has transported the keywords into Alt tags successfully. Images have been indexed on google, but as their link generates 404, images do not register on google. The sitemap fails when attempting to link the image and the image attachment page. Lots of 404s from the keyword sitemap (alt tag) when tested.
image sitemaps are updated on an irregular schedule and do not attach any keywords. The “project” is to get the keywords in sitemap (successful) and have those keywords link and display the appropriate image thereby bypassing the image sitemap and having images displayed in search more frequently for hundreds of images at a time.
Yep. Not an easy project. Still intrigued?
thanks for your interest in any case.

Thanks for working with me offline to investigate this issue more carefully. It looks like your theme does not generate “normal” media/attachment pages or taxonomy term archive pages that include media/attachment pages. This accounts for the 404 errors.

As noted in the earlier topics I referenced above, most themes explicitly exclude media/attachment pages from archive pages so modifying the theme’s PHP templates or finding another solution is required.

You can also avoid the problem by excluding the Att. Categories and Att. Tags taxonomies from the sitemaps generated by Yoast SEO. You can remove those sitemaps by going to the ” XML Sitemaps – Yoast SEO” screen, selecting the “Taxonomies” tab and setting the taxonomies to “Not in sitemap”. That should fix the problem but let you keep MLA active for its other features.

I am marking this topic resolved because you have found a solution for your application that does not use MLA. If you have any other comments on this topic that might help other MLA users I encourage you to post an update here to share them. Thanks again for working with me on this interesting topic.