Rel=canonical on image pages

[dbfrench]

Hi,

Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site.  I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results.  One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article.  Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page?  Or are they fine being left alone?  Thank you!

[Ryan-Bradley]

Hello,

Are you linking to the images in the article?

Can you provide the url to take a look?

[Ties.com]

I wouldn't recommend rel=canonical because these pages aren't the same content.  One is just the image while the main page is the entire article.  If you rel=canonical all of your image urls you could end up hurting yourself in Google image search to some degree.

[dbfrench]

The images are linked on the page (meaning if you hold your cursor over the image, it is clickable and the image is hosted on its own page but on the same domain).

Id rather not share the domain.

However, an example, the site is www.example.com.  The blog post is www.example.com/how-to-breathe.  The image URL is www.example.com/how-to-breathe/image-name

Thanks!

[dbfrench]

Thanks.  Do you recommend doing anything to the URLs?  Also, is there a better way to host images?  Are these URLs going to hurt the site at all?  It is a new site with just a few articles and I want to make sure we have the proper implementation since the beginning.  Thanks

[dbfrench]

Sorry Ryan, I replied to the original question.  Please see below for my response to your answer.  Thanks man!

[TakeshiYoung]

This is normal behavior for a Wordpress blog. If you feel there are a lot of these pages being indexed and they don't provide much value, you can noindex using plugins such as Yoast.