Sitemap adding inexistent links

Hi @joegp ,

To exclude or include content in your XML sitemap, please go to All in One SEO > Sitemaps > General Sitemap and scroll down to Post Types.

Uncheck Include All Post Types and you’ll see a separate checkbox for each Post Type where you can include or exclude them.

You’ll also see a field for Taxonomies. Uncheck Include All Taxonomies and you’ll see a separate checkbox for each Taxonomy.

For your reference, here is our documentation on this –
https://aioseo.com/docs/choosing-which-content-to-include-in-your-xml-sitemap/

You can then submit your sitemap to Google again by following our documentation here –
https://aioseo.com/docs/submitting-a-sitemap-to-google/

@joegp ,

Media Attachment is a type of content that is built into WordPress. It’s a special page that displays a media item, such as an image, along with some additional information.

When you add a media item to your content, you have the option to link the media item to its Attachment Page.

When a visitor clicks on the image, they are taken to the Attachment Page which displays the image title, the image, a caption and/or description (if set), and the comments form (if comments are enabled).

For most sites, there are no SEO benefits from Media Attachments. This is because these pages have little to no content on them, they just show the image title, the image itself and that’s all.

After further investigating this issue, I found some Media Attachment pages on your site such as https://effortless.marketing/home/social-media-200/

These pages don’t have any rich content that could be valuable for your ability to rank for specific terms, and therefore these pages are likely to poison the search results for your site.

I highly recommend redirecting your Attachment URLs to the Attachment itself.

For your reference, here is our documentation on this –
https://aioseo.com/docs/what-are-media-attachments-and-should-i-submit-them-to-search-engines/

This will also exclude the Attachments from the sitemap.

Thank you for the quick and detailed reply, although all i could really do is exclude Attachments, the other types were not checked (after i unchecked Include All) so i don’t know if there were included or not.

It seems all those links i mentioned before are attachment pages
so this page https://effortless.marketing/snapchat/
is the attachment page for this image https://effortless.marketing/wp-content/uploads/snapchat.jpg

But then i don’t get why it’s not working ? i mean the image is still there and working, so why is the attachment page failing ? i guess this is something i should ask the WordPress support team instead.
It is an old image and maybe the newer versions of wordpress use a different attachment URL structure from before.
I kinda wish attachment pages didn’t even exist, i certainly haven’t used any in 11 years.

After checking a few very new images, even some of those have issues, seems all attachment URLs that end with 1 slug like https://effortless.marketing/happy-easter/ give 404 errors, but ones with more than 1 are fine, like the one you found (https://effortless.marketing/home/social-media-200/)
Didn’t the first slug used to be Media or something ? ex. https://effortless.marketing/media/happy-easter/

Now who to talk to about that issue ? i guess i’ll start with WordPress itself.
Because if it’s a worpress issue then it’s a global issue.

(i marked this as resolved because it’s not a AIOSEO issue)

Hey @joegp,

I agree that this is probably a WordPress issue. Nevertheless, would you mind letting us know if they are able to identify the cause of this issue? We cannot fix it but perhaps we can work around it in the future so that it at least does not affect our sitemap.

Interestingly even though i excluded attachments from being on the sitemap they are still being indexed (isn’t that kinda the same thing?), i mean if i go to Search Appearance > Image SEO the Show in Search Results option is still set to Yes.
I set that to No and redirected image attachment pages to the attachment/image itself like you suggested, it should probably be the default behavior.

As for my issue, it looks like it’s not a wordpress issue, since i checked another site we manage and that has no issues, i also did a little research and it looks like it might be a theme issue.

Well, now i don’t know anymore.

According to google people have been having this issue for at least 8 years.

And according to those old post and my testing this is a slug/permalink issue.

I changed my permalinks to Plain from Post Name (/%postname%/) and then the attachment pages worked, but changing it to /%post_id%/ still results in the same issue, because even though post slugs changed to number (for ex https://effortless.marketing/3100/) the media slug stayed the same (it didn’t change to numbers)
I also tried /em/%postname%/ but that didn’t change the attachment slug, i’m pretty sure it should.

For one person the issue was caused by a plugin that changed slugs for some reason.

And after even more digging I finally found the culprit, it’s the latest version of the Elementor plugin, it has some new experimental features which they force everybody to beta test for them by having all of them on by default.
The exact issue is the new Landing pages, setting them to inactive fixed it.
In case someone else is having this issue, go to Elementor > Settings > Experiments > Landing Pages, set it to Inactive.

Hey @joegp,

That sounds like quite the witch hunt. I’m glad you were able to figure it out though. Thank you for sharing!