No index media pages?

With the release of Yoast SEO v7.0, there have been some major changes. You can read more about it here — https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-7-0/

In Search Appearance, you’ll find a new menu tab named Media. Whenever you upload media to WordPress it adds the video or image to the library. In addition, WordPress makes an attachment URL for this piece of media. These are mostly empty pages that serve no real purpose, but sometimes they get picked up by search engines.

Previously, we had an option to redirect attachment URLs to their post parent. This didn’t work for attachments that weren’t attached to anything. This new setting redirects all attachment URLs to the URL of the original image or media item. This setting is enabled by default for new installations.

If you redirect the attachment URL to the original image or media item, the attachment URL will automatically be set to noindex and will be excluded from the sitemap.

Hi Michael,

I’m having a similar problem as Anthony. But my question is a little different,

Google is indexing my attachment pages and based on the knowledge base I set the Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself to YES…

But will clicking this setting now make Google stop indexing all images in the search engine too? The way you describe it makes it sound like Google will just now index the image instead of the attachment page.

I don’t want any of my media to appear in search results so do I also need to mark NO to the Show Media in search results setting first and then go and Mark YES to the Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment?

Thanks
Josh

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by drastikone1.

@drastikone1

You can set Show Media in search results? to NO since you don’t want your media indexed by Google. This will automatically set the Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself? to No since there is no media attachment indexed.