Joost de Valk, the main developer of the popular WordPress plugin Yoast SEO, has pointed out on his blog that he encountered a bug with one of the major updates of the plugin (version 7.0). He urges all users of his website optimisation plugin to check the setting that allows redirection of attachment URLs as soon as possible.

This setting can be found in the WordPress administration under:

• SEO -> Search Appearance -> Media

The setting must be set to“Yes“. This will ensure that any images you have added to your WordPress site will redirect to themselves.

Why is it important that attachments redirect to themselves?

WordPress is programmed so that when you upload a new image to a website, it also creates a new subpage where that image can be accessed. There is usually very little content on such a subpage, and more often there is no content at all. In SEO jargon, this is described by the English term“thin content“, which means that the content is lacking.

If there are very few subpages on a website with thin content, the problem is virtually non-existent, as content-rich subpages still dominate. However, it is different when there are many such subpages. In this case, Google may penalise the website with lower rankings in its search engine. But it doesn’t have to.

As Google’s statements should always be taken with a pinch of salt, we advise you to check your Yoast SEO settings as soon as possible and make sure that images and other attachments are being redirected appropriately.

How to speed up the process of removing attachment URLs from search?

As Joost de Valk is aware of his mistake, he has developed a new plugin(Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge) to help speed up the removal of image URLs from search results. Although after changing the attachment redirect setting to“Yes“, your page will no longer have an XML map with links to attachments, it can still take several months for Google to remove the links from search results.

What does the Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge plugin do?

1. It creates an XML map with the URLs of the attachments, and for the dates of the last changes, the dates when the plugin was activated are recorded in the map.
2. For each subpage with an attachment, it returns error 410(Gone), indicating that the subpage has been removed.

The first function tells Google’s site indexing spiders that the attachment subpages have been changed, so the spiders will revisit those subpages sooner or later. The second feature helps to delete these subpages from search results more quickly.