Flood of Image Attachment URL's Indexed

[Barry]

It recently came to my attention that hundreds if attachment URL's are indexed in Google for one of my main sites.

This site has just over 100 blog posts published and indexed, but now has over 400 useless attachment URL's indexed in Google.

On researching how this problem could have happened, it appears that a Yoast SEO Plugin update caused the problem.

My fear is that I could be hit by Google Panda, because most of my indexed pages are now thin, low value attachment URL's - thanks Yoast!

Yoast has an option to 301 redirect attachments to image URL, which I've now done:

My question is, will this 301 redirect be enough for Google to remove these URL's from their index when they next crawl them?

Thanks

 

[bernard]

Yes, that should do it (a 301).

 

[Ryuzaki]

Agreed. It may not happen as fast as you like, but they will drop out of the index over time.

I can't remember what the URL structure looks like for those attachments on Wordpress but if there's some identifying sub-folder, you can request Google to drop it and all following URLs out of the index. I don't think I'd do that if you've already 301'd them though. They might follow through and drop your posts (again, I'm not sure here, but I'd play it safe).

 

[Darth]

The setting change you've made is what I have across all my sites

 

[Quick]

This literally happened to me last month. Took me a week to realize something was off then figured it was Yoast and made the same changes you did. I recommend resubmitting your site map to Search Console without the attachment urls. Google basically recognized it within a day and traffic returned to normal levels (it was down that one week which tipped me off). Hope this helps.

 

[bernard]

Something similar but worse happened to me. I changed some pages to posts using a plugin and for some reason, the post urls got redirected to the attachment page with the same name. I was ranking for attachment pages in Google for a while. Could have been bad,