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Indexing & Sitemaps · Guide #9

Link Behavior

Control how external links behave across your site — nofollow, new tab, sponsored attributes, UGC markup, URL structure cleanup, attachment redirects, and breadcrumb navigation.

⏱ 6 min read 👤 Intermediate 📦 v7.0+

Where to Find This Tab

Go to SEO Rank Genius → Indexing & Sitemaps → Link Behavior (fifth tab under the “Main” group).

URL Structure

Clean up your URL structure for better SEO and user experience.

SettingWhat It Does
Strip Category BaseRemoves /category/ from URLs. E.g., /category/news/ becomes /news/. Shorter URLs improve CTR.
Redirect Attachment PagesWordPress creates a page for every uploaded media file. This 301-redirects them to the parent post, preventing thin content issues.
Orphan Attachment RedirectWhen an attachment has no parent post, redirect it to this URL. Leave empty to redirect to the homepage.
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Important: After toggling “Strip Category Base,” go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save once to flush rewrite rules.

Troubleshooting

Nofollow Not Appearing in Source Code

  • Clear your page cache — caching plugins serve stale HTML.
  • The plugin applies attributes dynamically on render, so they won’t appear if you inspect the raw database content.
  • Check the HTML source of the live page (Ctrl+U), not the WordPress editor.

Category URLs Still Show /category/

  • After toggling “Strip Category Base,” go to Settings → Permalinks and click “Save Changes” to flush rewrite rules.
  • Check if another plugin (Yoast, Rank Math) also manages the category base — disable one to avoid conflicts.