Plugin update put 3,000 attachment pages back in the index

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  • Post
    • September 26, 2026 at 5:01 am
    wp_wanda
    Participant
    Short story, long annoyance. An SEO plugin update in July reset the setting that redirects media attachment pages to the file. Nobody noticed for two months.

    Now GSC shows roughly 3,000 URLs like /product-photo-12/ indexed, each a thin page with one image and nothing else. Site has about 600 real pages, so the index is now mostly junk.

    I’ve turned the redirect back on. Questions:
    – do I need to do anything else, or just wait for Google to recrawl and drop them?
    – would submitting a temporary sitemap of those URLs speed up the recrawl?

    And a PSA for everyone on WordPress: go check that setting after your next plugin update.

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