How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content

[xpers]

I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts.

I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed.

I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions.

1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google

2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from.

What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc.

All suggestions greatly received!

[Attain-Design]

Hi,

We have worked on a site in a similar situation as the one you're in.

I would personally remove the linked media through the appropriate template file. I assume there's no reason for these pages to even be there?

If possible, you could set these pages to noindex.

If all else fails, you could set a canonical tag to the original post where the image resides, this would eliminate any issues from an SEO point of view.

Regards,

Anthony Ankers

[xpers]

Thanks for the advice!

I have emailed the theme creator to see if they can edit the template file to remove these additional pages.

In the meantime I have just noticed that the YOAST plugin has an option to redirect all these attached images pages to the parent page. This is just a tick in a box. Will this simple option work?

Thanks again!

[EricaMcGillivray]

Yes, the Yoast plug-in's settings will alter your robots.txt and fix the problem across your site.