Jun 15, 2019

Yoast told me to redirect my media attatchment URLs and since doing so my impressions have plummeted

Could someone please help me? I have had my website for over a year and working really hard on it. My impressions and rankings have been going up steadily and I thought all was good. Then I noticed that Yoast was warning that their 'redirect Url Media' feature had a bug in their software, advising users to allow URLs redirects on images.

Mine had always been set to 'no'.

So I changed the button to yes 'redirect URLs on images'.

That was two weeks ago and since then my impressions have gone from 15000 to 4000. I am at a loss to know what to do. I contacted Yoast and they just said to use their plugin' index surge'. I installed it and am waiting to see what happens.

I don't know whether to just switch the button back to no - it seems my site was doing a lot better before I changed it.

If someone could give me ANY advice I would really appreciate it.

Thank you

Details

Other SEO issue

Locked

Informational notification.

This question is locked and replying has been disabled.

Community content may not be verified or up-to-date. Learn more.

All Replies (6)

cristina

Product Expert Alumni

Jun 16, 2019

It might have been a coincidence, the drop might have been caused by something else.

Can you check in server access logs if you had many visits from Googlebot to attachment URLs?

Make sure that everything you are using, WordPress version, theme, plugins etc. are the latest version.

You might try changing back the option to redirect URL of attachments to no. This in theory would add a noindex tag to the attachment URLs, but check with a few attachment URLs to be sure that it has the noindex tag.

Also check if your theme is linking unnecessarily to attachment URLs.

Can you remember if you saw problems with attachments URLs in the Index Coverage status report in the Google Search Console?

It's a Drama

Original Poster

Jun 21, 2019

Hi Cristina, thank you so much for your reply but I am afraid I'm not sure what you mean? I don't know how to check if the attachment URLs had visits from bots.

The latest thing is google has sent me 410 errors (they are all related to my images) say that they cannot crawl them.

Yoast has told me this:

"Google Search Console may notify you of an increase in crawl errors after changing the setting. This is to be expected when a large quantity of previously indexable URLs suddenly returns 301 redirect status codes. You do not have to do anything and Google will eventually drop the attachment URLs from the search results since they don't exist anymore.

If you continue to see the errors, you can speed up the process of Google removing attachment pages from your search results by installing and activating the Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge plugin. This plugin makes all of your website's attachment URLs return a 410 deleted status as well as redirecting them to the media files.

After six months the attachment URLs (410 crawl errors) should be gone from the search results. At that time, you should remove the search index purge plugin and keep the redirect setting of the attachment URLs set to “Yes”."

I am confused as to what to do. I don't want to wait six months for this to sort itself out! I have asked other friends with blogs and they say they don't know whether their images are set to yes or no for redirect.

To make things worse a website developer has just told me that because of the redirects my site is super slow...

I'm sorry if I sound as though I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just a little confused and don't know what to do for the best of my site.

Thank you Cristina, your help is so very much appreciated.

It's a Drama

Original Poster

Jun 23, 2019

Hello, I have done what you said and have changed the buttn back to no however I am confused about what you said:

"check with a few attachment URLs to be sure that it has the noindex tag".

Could you please tell me how I would do that? Or could anyone else tell me? Thank you. Also, after making these changes, should I resubmit another site map? Thank you in advance

Ross 9235

Aug 5, 2019

I'm having the same issue, it's a nightmare!! I have limited technical knowledge and this has thrown a huge spanner in the works and so far I haven't been able to fix it. I installed and ran the suggested Yoast plugin fix, but some reviewers of the plugin have said it made things worse! There have been a lot of downloads of the plugin though, so a handful of negative reviews probably are not representative.

Tony McCreath

Platinum Product Expert

Let's fix it 🛠️

Aug 5, 2019

Switch the report to showing pages. If you click on a page it will shows its individual performance. Try and find which pages suddenly lost their presence. Are they related to the Yoast setting change?

Redirects should typically not slow down a site. Most people directly visit the page they want and don't experience a redirect. Maybe if your server is having to deal with a lot of hits to those redirecting pages it would slow a bit down.

Ross 9235

Aug 5, 2019

I now have a bunch of 404s under Google Search Console / Index / Coverage / Examples

If I 'inspect' one of the urls I get the attached image.

Should I copy all of these url addresses e.g.

mywebsiteaddresshere/attachment_tag/wedding-photographer-at-somerset-cricket-ground/

...and then copy them into the robots.txt file on my server and make them all 'disallow?'

Is that the best/fastest way to sort this mess out? I have already downloaded and installed the 'Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge' plugin in Wordpress and ran it.