rel="nofollow" tag for lightbox links

Hello

I have website image gallery which uses Lightbox. It has links as following <a href="?itemId=randomnumber". Now Google treats these link as Alternate page with proper canonical tag. How can i add rel="nofollow" to these lightbox links only. Rest of the image and description, i want Google to render.

Thank you

Hello - @Prab,

I can help you out here with this situation. Below, I've added some potential solutions to help you out -

• What is the canonical URL for each of those query strings (itemId=randomnumber)? Is it the main URL of that page? Then it's correctly set up. Google will not index those additional lightbox URLs/pages, and having them in the Google Search Console is not a problem, you can ignore them.
   
• For Example -
  • Main page: https://example.com/gallery -> Canonical URL: https://example.com/gallery
  • Lightbox Image URLs: 
    • Image 1: https://example.com/gallery?itemId=1212121212 -> Canonical URL: https://example.com/gallery
    • Image 2: https://example.com/gallery?itemId=1313131313 -> Canonical URL: https://example.com/gallery
• Google will not index image 1, and image 2 as different pages, as the canonical URL for the images is the main URL/page (https://example.com/gallery), which is perfect!
• Squarespace doesn't allow us to edit the robots.txt file. Otherwise, we could add a rule to crawlers not to crawl such URLs (?itemId=randomnumber).

Additional information that might be helpful for you:

• The rel="canonical" link element.
• Google Search Console Guide.

Thank you
Sadul Sifat.

This is pretty interesting, but i d love to know your input on SEO with this absolutly stupid itemIDs which is inappropiate for artists and photographers.
It used to be perfectly setup in version 7

I even don t understand how Magnum photographers have been alright dealing with this issue.

It was and should still be the file name or a URL i can define myself.

would love to hear your thoughts on this.