Should I 301 images to parent post?

[NoahsDad]

I'm using Yoast's wordpress seo plug in and a few months ago I enabled the feature that redirects all images to the parent post. This month I noticed a huge drop in my organic search results for images.

I just did a crawl of my site and it looks like every image does indeed have a 301 redirect on it. I'm curious what the though is on this. Should I unselect that option? I was under the impression it wouldn't make a difference with traffic and actually thought it would help since it brought people to the post instead of just the image page for that picture.

Thoughts?

[wrttnwrd]

I'd unselect it.

Thinking from a UX perspective: If I want to see an image, I want to see an image. I don't want to get redirected to the post itself.

And Google's imagebot won't be able to (or will refuse to) index the images for that reason.

Normally, on WordPress, I use one of the Lightbox plugins: Someone clicks the image and sees the full-sized version in a DHTML layer, without leaving the post. That lets you display the image on the same page, doesn't seem to hurt image indexation, and gives a good user experience.

One other note - you don't say, but if you aren't, you should create an image sitemap. There are a bunch of good WordPress plugins that can generate the XML for you. That's been a huge help for me.

[NoahsDad]

Thanks. I'm using the Yoast plug in which does make an image site map. So I should be good there.

On this post it says that it won't harm you if you select that option http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success but it sounds like if googlebot won't index the image, that's hurting you.

Also when I look at google webmaster tools it shows my image sitemap and it appears the majority of my images are being indexed. Also if I search for images they show up on google image search.

But could be understanding what's happening incorrectly.

Are you sure the images won't get indexed with that option turned on?

One of the main reasons I selected that option was because of all the posts I've read online about how each image has a url and you don't want those urls to appear in the search engines.

Thoughts?

[Marcus_Miller]

This is one of those features in the Yoast plugin that is kind of useful if you have a problem with elements that you don't want being indexed getting indexed.

The way it works is that WordPress considers everything an attachment and gives it it's own URL. If this works for you and brings more traffic in then great, leave it turned off, if it's a problem, the Plugin gives you an easy way to deal with that via automated 301's for the attachments.

This is a game of experimentation and measurement and if this has had a negative effect, then just roll it back and see if that improves matters (you can always change it back).

[NoahsDad]

Thanks. I guess what's confusing for me is that the images are still getting indexed with that option on or off.