Media & Attachment URLs Settings

In most cases, peoples won’t need to show the media (attachment) pages in the search results, nor to the visitors since it doesn’t contain anything useful except the media file. In this case, it is mostly recommended to enable the media (attachment) redirects.

However, in some scenarios, someone may not want to enable the media (attachment) redirects as they want to show the media (attachment) pages to the visitors but not in the search results (i.e. Photography websites etc). In those cases, selecting the option NO will set noindex robots meta to the media (attachment) pages to ensure this doesn’t appear in the search results.

Depending on your needs, both of these options are perfectly fine to use and they have their own use cases.

@mazedulislamkhan thanks very much for the reply.

I notice a number of other people are having similar problems since the recent Yeost update.

What I ultimately want is:
* For image urls not to be indexed separately by Google as I do not want them showing up in search results (which is currently happening) – I only want the page showing up in Google search results;
* No 500 errors showing up in Google Analytics – I’m getting dozens of these at the moment, all referring to image urls that don’t exist.
* For Google to crawl the metadata of images as part of the page crawl – we include keywords in the title, alt tags and captions that we want Google to crawl) – my understanding is that this is essentially what the old “redirect to post URL setting did).

If you can advise the correct settings in Yoast to ensure my image metadata is crawled as part of the page or post, while avoiding Google analytics 500 errors and ensuring image URLs do not appear in Google search results it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your continued assistance.

If you want your attachment URLs to not show up in the search results but still be accessed by your visitors, you can choose not to redirect the attachment URL to the attachment itself, and then select the option for it to not show in the search results. It will be excluded from the XML Sitemap Index, and will have a noindex tag, but it will have a follow tag, so Google will still crawl that page and follow its links on that page.

Thank you @mikes41720 for all your help with this.

Just to clarify, you say “If you want your attachment URLs to not show up in the search results but still be accessed by your visitors, you can choose not to redirect the attachment URL to the attachment itself, and then select the option for it to not show in the search results”

Apologies if I’m being a bit dense, but what settings are you specifically recommending here?

To be clear, the outcome I am trying to achieve is that when Google crawls a page or post on our site I want the crawl to include all the images and any metadata the images contain. This will ensure any SEO elements relevant to those images are captured and associated with the specific pages or posts the images appear on.

However, I do not want google to index image URLs separately and show these individually in search results as this effectively fills the search results with rubbish and directly impacts peoples ability to actually find the information I want them to find.

As such, I’m trying to get clear and precise instructions on exactly which settings will achieve this.

Thanks in advance for your continued help.

When the media (attachment) redirect is enabled or set not to show in the search results, you won’t see the media (attachment) pages in the search results. However, this doesn’t mean that your images won’t appear in the Google image search results. Google image search results may still show the images from your site. There is a difference between media (attachment) page and actual media itself.

However, if you wish to disable the media files completely on your site to be indexed by the search engines, you can add this following to your theme functions.php file which will exclude all of the images from the sitemap:

add_filter( 'wpseo_xml_sitemap_img', '__return_false' );

Thanks @mazedulislamkhan

Yep happy for the images to appear in google image results, just want to make sure the media attachment urls don’t show un the search results.

Appreciate your assistance with this and all the clarification you have provided.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by J&D.