Be careful – V7.X Will get you into Google Penalty [Thin content]

  • I’ve had this plugin for years but in V7.X they completely changed the way they treat media pages. As a result they allowed indexing of 4,000 thin content pages with media files. I wasn’t aware of it as until I’ve received a Google penalty for thin content last week.

    When I looked at the google console I found out that in mid March Google indexed 4,000 pages of thin content. In the past (before V7.X) these pages were redirected to the post itself and NON of the sitemaps had links to them.

    Who is the clown in the Yoast team that decided to cancel this redirection that worked for years? Who is the clown who decided to include them in Sitemaps?
    Everyone knows that these are pages that generated by WordPress and they are useless for search engines.

    Why did you make the change? It was working fine for everyone.

    Now I am left to cleanup the mess that they created and I am facing a long wait until the penalty is lifted – this is a HUGE loss for my site.

    There are countless of posts in forums about this issue and I believe that lots of sites are going to get the penalty soon.

    Be very very careful

    Also – anyone who is facing this issue – you now must use “noindex” on these pages to tell Google to remove them. If you just redirect them they will stay in the Google index for months.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • agree, same case here!! out of nowhere over 3000 new pages in google index!! rankings are dropping. unbelievble! why did this happen? now when I will noindexd this I will have over 3000 404 pages! just great! I am not happy at all!!

    Hi @jackcronfield and @krunekbrunek,

    Thanks for your comments.

    We are sorry for the problems you are experiencing with Yoast SEO. Unfortuntately, there was a bug in Yoast SEO 7.0 where some settings were not properly migrated after updating to v7.0. The bug was completely fixed in v7.0.3 so you should no longer experience problems with the Yoast settings being migrated incorrectly. Please, refer to the changelog for more details: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/change-log-wordpress-seo/

    For some users, this caused the attachment pages to be indexed, as the index setting was not correctly imported from the previous plugin version. We’d suggest going to “SEO > Search Appearance > Media” and:

    1. Make sure that your attachment pages are redirected to the attachment itself or, alternatively,
    2. Toggle the “Show Media in search results?” button to No

    Either action will make Google update its index and remove these pages from the search results. As much as we’d like these changes to happen instantly, it may take Google some time to reflect them in the search results. Re-submitting your sitemap index to Google Search Console may speed up this process.

    Lastly, when setting the attachment pages to noindex, Google will indeed show a 404 crawl error for them. This fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. 404 errors are a perfectly normal part of the web.

    Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by monbauza.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by monbauza.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by monbauza.
    Thread Starter jack.cronfield

    (@jackcronfield)

    I am using version 7.5.1 – so obviously the “fix” that you did doesn’t work.

    Consider this scenario:
    1. upgrade from version 6.x -> v7.0
    2. A few days later upgrade v7.0 -> v7.0.3

    I suspect that once the first upgrade is completed you lose track of the original setup (as the migration has been “completed”) so your fix doesn’t help anyone who was quick to upgrade.

    The fact is that I have 4,000 attachment pages indexed. So the “fix” didn’t fix it.
    It looks like I am not the only one so obviously something is terribly broken.

    Also observe your wording for this fix in your change log: “Fixes a bug where the option settings that needs to be migrated are backfilled prematurely, resulting in settings not being migrated as expected.”

    Do you really think that we can understand what you mean here???? What is “option settings”? what is “needs to be migrated are backfilled prematurely”?

    Do you think that it’s helpful???

    Hi @jackcronfield,

    You are right. The bugfix only works when updating from v6.x to v7.0.3 or a later version and it also ensures that no plugin settings will be lost when updating Yoast SEO to future releases. If you updated to v7.0 and lost your settings, the only solution is to manually change the settings. We totally understand this is troublesome and we are sorry for that.

    As you can read on this GitHub issue, we’re working on a post about this topic and possible solutions to remove attachment URLs from the search results.

    Thread Starter jack.cronfield

    (@jackcronfield)

    All your solutions are too late for me as I am suffering the Panada penalty now

    Hi @jackcronfield and @krunekbrunek,

    Joost has just written a new post explaining the best possible solution to remove your attachment URLs from the search results: https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/

    We’d recommend you update to Yoast SEO v7.5.3 and install the Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge plugin to purge attachment URLs out of Google’s index as fast as possible. This plugin makes all your attachment URLs return an HTTP 410 status. It then creates an XML sitemap with a recent last modified date, containing all those URLs.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by monbauza.
    anonymized-15437957

    (@anonymized-15437957)

    Here, I had the same problem and decided to delete Yoast from my sites. I was sad about this because it is a very good plugin. A month has passed and Google still penalizes my site.

    My sitemap is still on Google, like Yoast’s sitemap_index.xml. This is ridiculous. It seems that Yoast collects the whole site for a system of it and never excludes everything.

    Another thing: robots.txt still loads the link to the sitemap generated by Yoast and I do not know where it gets because I updated my robots.txt file and it continues to show the undue link to the Yoast sitemap, which no longer exists.

    Plugin Support marcanor

    (@marcanor)

    Hello @edibarboza,

    If you have deleted the Yoast SEO plugin from your site, the sitemap_index.xml file should no longer be active.

    Regarding the robots.txt file, the Yoast plugin does not add a link to the sitemap file. Can you please try to manually edit the robots.txt file and remove any URLs pointing to the Yoast sitemap.

    Please note that the attachment pages are a default WordPress feature. If you remove the Yoast plugin (which gives you the option of deactivating them), they will remain in the index. If you wish to remove them, we recommend you read this article for more information.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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