Pages are created for each image The Drupal 7.59 installation we have a new page for each uploaded image in the files directory. (It's been like this at least since Drupal 7.39 when I joined this project.)

If the image is awesome-photo-by-Robin.jpg, we will get www.ourdomain.com/files/awesome-photo-by-robinjpg. (The missing period before the extension is not a typo.)  

The problem is that these pages get indexed by search engines, and because they have no content except header, image and footer, they get very low ranking and clutters our SEO results.

Obviously, these are automatically created during the upload process, where you have no possibility to disable or choose this. However, afterwards, one can go through /admin/content/file and edit the file and voilá, some information appears.


  


Removing the alias doesn't help, since the page remain anyway. (I also cleared the Drupal cache to make sure.)


Can these auto-generated pages be disabled somehow?
If they can't be disabled, we're considering adding Disallow: /files/* to the robots.txt file. Do you think that would work at all to amend this issue, or maybe cause other issues down the road?
What is the actual purpose of these pages?


This is the HTML that's surrounding the IMG tag, maybe it can give you any clues?

&lt;div class="region region-content"&gt;
    &lt;div id="block-system-main" class="block block-system"&gt;
        &lt;div class="content"&gt;
            &lt;div id="file-136" class="file file-image file-image-png"&gt;
                &lt;div class="content"&gt;
                    &lt;img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.ourdomain.com/sites/default/files/fancy-image.png" width="425" height="282" alt="" /&gt;
            &lt;/div&gt;
        &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
Don't think this is to do with core. Do you have the "File entity" module installed by any chance?

There's a permission of "View files" that anonymous users will have ticked in. If you untick that any of those /files/* will get access denied for annon users