Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial 2014 Alt Text by Erik.

Search Engine Optimized Alt Text in WordPress Thanks Dave. I went ahead and did the image.php redirect solution detailed above as it seemed the simplest (I did not want to add another plugin). It seems to be working fine.

I haven’t found an easy way to simply remove those attachment links (WordPress doesn’t seem to provide any way to switch attachment settings on an image–ie from a “Post URL” setting to “File URL” or “None” as you have it–on either individual images or in bulk form. And I haven’t found a plugin that does it either). So in lieu of any other solutions I hope this image redirect provides the same practical SEO effect as having image attachments set to “None”, or at least will reduce damage done by linking to those practically empty image pages.

I am wondering, though, if by using this redirect solution those image attachment pages in fact still exist on “Google’s radar”, perhaps still having a negative effect? I guess I don’t totally understand the nature of redirect and how Google would view pages that have a redirect applied to them. Do they ignore them, or would these low-content pages “dilute” the overall average quality of pages on my site, continuing to cause damage to SEO? Maybe I need to find a way to completely eliminate these image attachment pages if possible.

Thanks for the thoughts on alt tags, I had basically been doing the same (removing hyphens and copying title attribute keywords to the alt text) but have usually not been capitalizing each word. That is a good idea though. It seems the main benefit of that is that it is more attractive when appearing in text snippets in the SERPs (“Amish Buggies Ohio” in your snippet just looks better than “amish buggies ohio”).

As always your response was helpful and much appreciated.

Erik