If you’re using WordPress as your website’s main content management system, then you’re likely using oEmbed to embed videos and other multimedia content. But if you want to remove the rel=alternate tags from those videos and other multimedia content, there are a few steps you can take.

  1. Log in to your WordPress site and open the Appearance settings.
  2. Under “Web Standards,” select “No HTML.”
  3. Click on the “Add New” button and enter a name for your new setting: “Remove alternate tags from multimedia.”
  4. Click on the “Save” button to create your new setting and save it as a preference in your WordPress site’s Settings page.
  5. Repeat these steps for all of your multimedia content, making sure to save each one with a different name so that they’re easy to find when you need them again later on.

For today’s adventure, I wanted to figure out how to delete all of the nonsense that gets included — because there’s just no reason for it unless you’re worried about other WordPress sites using oEmbed to link to you. As long as you include Open Graph markup, your users can still share on Facebook, Twitter, etc, and your site will embed there just fine.

Luckily removing these from the template is easy, all you’re going to need to do is open up your theme’s functions.php file and paste in the following line:

Once you’ve done so, both of the <link rel=”alternate” lines will be gone. There will still be a lot of other unnecessary stuff, but I’ll save that for another day.