WordPress Attachment Pages: Why They Hurt SEO and How to Turn Them Off

What an attachment page is

When you upload an image, WordPress stores the file (for example /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/tent.jpg) and, on older setups, also creates a page for it, such as /tent/ or /?attachment_id=123. That page usually holds the image, a title and little else.

For SEO that is a problem:

• Hundreds of near-empty pages compete for crawl attention with your real pages.
• Google may show the attachment page instead of the post that uses the image.
• Visitors who land there see one picture and leave.

Yoast's own help page calls these URLs not useful in almost every setup (Yoast, Media pages).

What changed in WordPress 6.4

WordPress 6.4 (November 2023) added an option called wp_attachment_pages_enabled (make.wordpress.org, October 16, 2023):

So an upgrade did not fix older sites. If your site is older than 6.4, assume the pages are still there until you check.

How to check if your site still has them

1. Open the Media Library, click any image and copy its "attachment page" link, or try yoursite.com/?attachment_id= followed by a media ID.
2. If you land on a page with your theme's header and one image, the pages are on. If you land on the image file or the parent post, they are off.
3. In Search Console, open Performance > Search results > Pages and filter page URLs for attachment or for slugs that match image names. Any clicks or impressions there mean Google has them indexed.
4. Check your sitemap index for an attachment or media sitemap. It should not be there.

How to turn them off

Sources: Rank Math general settings, Yoast Media pages, make.wordpress.org.

Which target is better, the file or the parent post? Rank Math argues for the post, because it passes any links the attachment page earned to a real page. Yoast and WordPress core send visitors to the file. Both remove the thin page. If some attachment URLs have real backlinks, redirecting to the post keeps more value.

Cleaning up attachment URLs already in Google

Turning the setting on is most of the work. Then:

1. Let Google recrawl. Redirected URLs drop out of the index as Google crawls them again. This can take weeks on a large site.
2. Do not block them in robots.txt. Google has to crawl the old URL to see the redirect.
3. Remove them from your sitemap. Your SEO plugin does this once media pages are off. Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console.
4. Spot check a few with URL Inspection. The result should show the redirect target as the page Google picked.
5. Use the Removals tool only for urgent cases. It hides a URL for about six months; it does not delete it (Google, Removals tool).

Your images stay in Google Images. Image search indexes the file URL, which is not affected.

When to keep attachment pages

A few sites use them on purpose: photo portfolios where each image has a long caption, or download libraries where each file page has a description. If that is you, keep them on, write real text on each, and treat them like any other page. Everyone else should turn them off.