Remove Yoast media pages

  • Resolved wilhelmf

    (@wilhelmf)


    9 months, 1 week ago

    I only discovered two days ago that WordPress was creating pages for every photo I uploaded. This is how it was set up in Yoast. After some googling, it turned out that Yoast had a bug in 2018 that caused this error. I have now turned the button off and from now on no new pages will be created when I upload a photo.

    When the bug became known at the time, the error was corrected. However, apparently without switching the button again. Why didn’t Yoast automatically return the buttons to their original position?

    In Google Search Console I read now that there are more than 3800 pages. I only created 1050 of them. The rest are attachment pages.

    My question now is: how do I get rid of those 2700 pages? Hundreds of them are in Google’s index. The button in Yoast is now off and the attachment (media) pages can no longer be reached in the Yoast sitemap. Yoast had made 3 sitemaps for those attachment pages. If i click upon those sitemaps, it result in an error page. What happen next with those attachment (media) pages? In short, what can I do best?

    • This topic was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by wilhelmf.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @wilhelmf,

    Thanks for reaching out, but I doubt the bug you’re referring to affects your site in any way since you have Yoast SEO plugin v22.1. Did you recently install our plugin? New installs have the Enable media pages feature turned OFF. This means you have an attachment sitemap in your sitemap index. For URLs that are already indexed, you may consider using the URL removal tool in Google Search Console.

    • This reply was modified 9 months ago by Maybellyne.
    Thread Starter wilhelmf

    (@wilhelmf)

    The plugin at my website has been updated all this time and I believe that was exactly the problem. When users updated the plugin (in 2018), they often encountered the bug in Yoast’s system. The photos were then provided by Yoast as separate (empty) attachment pages with a photo on it. These attachment pages are not listed in the WP dashboard. Its existence is therefore not immediately noticeable.

    You write that my website is not affected? It seems to me that if Google Search Console crawled 3800 pages and I only created 1050, this is a serious problem. Search Sonsole had created 3 additional sitemaps for these attachment pages. There is currently only 1 sitemap listed in Search Console with just over 1070 pages. Several hundred attachment pages are probably still indexed by Google.

    I just hope that the attachment files will be removed by Google the coming months now that they are no longer accessible in the sitemap. I think the Google removal tool for URLs is only for 6 months.

    People who want to read more about this Yoast bug it can visit this authority site: searchenginejournal.com/yoast-plugin-bug/255639

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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