WordPress plugins we love: Attachment Pages Redirect

In this series of articles we try to highlight lesser known plugins that might not yet be on your radar. Plugins that can really add value to your site. This little plugin takes care of one simple task that might not seem all that important on the surface:

Makes attachment pages redirects (301) to post parent if any. If not, redirects (302) to home page.

So what does that mean? As standard, WordPress has a habit of letting search engines index post/page attachments, the most important of which are images. This means a user might search for the amazing content your latest post has to offer, but end up only finding an image from your post. Chances are they won’t make the effort to dig up the original post that the image came from.

Go ahead and check your logs/web stats for your websites. Are you seeing lots of specific image only hits? If so, the chances are you’re seeing this particular behavior and possibly losing eyeballs on your site as a result.

The Attachment Pages Redirect plugin offers a simple and elegant solution. If a user tries to access an attachment like an image by itself, they’re redirected to the full post in question. They still get to see the image, but it’s presented as part of the full post/page of which it’s a part. They get what they’re after, and you get someone reading the full post you took time to craft. Everyone wins!

If you really want to get into the weeds on why this behaviour isn’t ideal, check out this blog post on thin content over at SEO Blog.