Social Sharing & Archives
Open Graph images and controlling author and date archives.
Social Sharing and Archives
Two small settings in Vibe SEO have an outsized effect on how your site looks when it is shared and how clean it stays in Google. The first controls the image that shows up when someone posts one of your links on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, iMessage, or Slack. The second retires the thin author and date pages that WordPress creates automatically. Both live in one place and take about a minute to set.
Where these settings live
Go to the WordPress admin, open the left menu item named Vibe SEO, and click Settings. Scroll to the card titled Search appearance defaults. Near the bottom of that card is a subheading called Social and archives. Everything in this lesson is under that heading. When you finish, click the Save search appearance defaults button. You will see a confirmation notice that reads "Search appearance defaults saved."
The default social image
When a page of yours is shared on social media or in a chat app, those platforms look for an Open Graph image to build the preview card. If they cannot find one, your link shows up as a bare, imageless box that people scroll right past.
Vibe SEO decides which image to use in this order. First it looks for an image you set directly on the page in the Vibe SEO box. If there is none, it uses the page's featured image. If the page has neither, it falls back to the default social image you set here. So this field is your safety net for every page that would otherwise have no picture at all.
To set it, find the field labeled Default social image. Paste the full web address of an image, for example https://yoursite.com/images/share.jpg. The field only accepts a URL, so upload your image to the Media Library first, copy its file address, and paste it in. Once you save, a small thumbnail of the image appears right below the field so you can confirm you pasted the right one.
This same image also serves as the fallback for the Twitter and X preview. Vibe SEO builds those cards as a large image card, which means the preview is wide and landscape. For that reason, choose a wide, landscape image rather than a tall or square one. A clean graphic with your logo or brand works well as a universal default.
Thin archives
WordPress automatically creates two kinds of pages that almost never help your SEO. Author archives live at addresses like /author/yourname/ and list every post by one writer. Date archives live at addresses like /2026/08/ and list everything published in a given month or year. On most business sites these pages are thin, duplicate versions of content that already exists elsewhere, and they clutter the index Google builds of your site.
Under the Thin archives row you get two checkboxes:
- Disable author archives, which redirects any /author/ address to your homepage.
- Disable date archives, which redirects any dated address such as /2026/ to your homepage.
Check the ones you want to retire and save. From then on, anyone or any search crawler that lands on those pages is sent with a permanent 301 redirect to your homepage, which keeps them out of search results without breaking anything.
One important condition is built into this feature. The redirects only run while Vibe SEO is your primary SEO plugin. If another SEO plugin such as Yoast is still in charge, these checkboxes do nothing until you switch Vibe to primary. This matches the way Yoast handles the same setting, so moving from Yoast to Vibe will not silently bring those pages back into the index.
What a good result looks like
After setup, share one of your links in a private message or a test post and confirm a real image and title appear in the preview. Then visit an old /author/ or date URL in your browser; if you enabled the toggles, you should land on your homepage. That is the whole checklist.
Pro tips and common mistakes
- The default social image is a fallback, not an override. Pages with their own image or a featured image keep using those. This is the picture for everything else, so pick something that fits your whole site.
- Paste a full, public URL. A relative path or a private image will produce a broken preview.
- Most single-author business sites benefit from disabling author archives. Almost every site benefits from disabling date archives, since dated list pages rarely earn traffic.
- If the archive redirects do not seem to work, check that Vibe SEO is set as your primary SEO plugin. That is the usual cause.