Joost de Valk

Yoast

Anton Timmermans

Jip Moors

Omar Reiss

Taco Verdonschot

<p>The purpose of this SEO plugin is to purge attachment URLs out of Google’s index as fast as possible. This helps sites<br />
that might have suffered from having too many thin content pages in the search index by removing them in the fastest<br />
way possible.</p>
<h3>What does this plugin do?</h3>
<p>This plugin makes all your attachment URLs return an HTTP 410 status. It then creates an XML sitemap with a recent last<br />
modified date, containing all those URLs. The XML sitemap with recent post modified date makes Google spider <em>all</em> those<br />
URLs again. The 410 status code makes sure Google takes them out of its search results in the fastest way possible.</p>
<p>With a nice trick, we also show end users the actual attachment image, so the user experience is not as poor as when<br />
they see an error page.</p>
<h3>Yoast SEO required</h3>
<p>This plugin is an extension to <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/" rel="ugc">Yoast SEO</a>. It requires it to work.</p>
<h3>How long should you run this plugin?</h3>
<p>After 6 months the attachment URLs should be gone from the search results. If you then remove the plugin, and keep<br />
Yoast SEO’s redirect setting on “Yes”, you have the best long term behavior for attachment URLs: to redirect to the<br />
actual attachment.</p>
<h3>Does Google condone this?</h3>
<p>This method has been discussed with and OK’d by Google.</p>
<h3>From within WordPress</h3>
<ol>
<li>Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’</li>
<li>Search for ‘Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge’</li>
<li>Activate Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge from your Plugins page.</li>
<li>Go to “after activation” below.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Manually</h3>
<ol>
<li>Upload the <code>yoast-seo-search-index-purge</code> folder to the <code>/wp-content/plugins/</code> directory</li>
<li>Activate the Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress</li>
<li>Go to “after activation” below.</li>
</ol>
<h3>After activation</h3>


Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge

Remove attachment URLs from Google's index as fast as possible to prevent thin content penalties.

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