Google Indexing Error

Hi Sanjay,

These are media attachment pages, which WordPress creates by default for each of your image. You can automatically redirect these pages to the actual image files, so that Google won’t crawl these pages anymore.

To do so, go to SEO → Search Appearance → Media and select Yes when asked if you want to redirect these pages.

To do so, go to SEO → Search Appearance → Media and select Yes when asked if you want to redirect these pages.

This was always the setting, yet I have the google error.

A week ago I installed your patch-fix plugin “Search Appearance – Yoast SEO”.

Errors in Google Console is a big red flag for us.

Very unhappy with slow support & plugin issue!!

Can you please disable the purge plugin temporarily and resubmit the sitemap to check whether this resolves the issue?

Disabling the purge plugin temporarily won’t cause any issue as you have the media (attachment) redirect already enabled on your site.

Now I’m seeing a lot of 410 errors in GSC.
https://prnt.sc/k88r9d

I’m thoroughly confused, what should I do?
Should I delete the purge plugin or let it be or something else?

It is expected that you get an increase in 410 notifications from Google Search Console. You are signaling to Google that you want these attachment URLs to be deleted (hence the 410) and de-indexed.

The purpose of the search index purge plugin is to purge attachment URLs out of the search results as fast as possible. Just setting the Yoast SEO attachment URL redirect setting to “Yes” isn’t fast enough. When you do that, you no longer have XML sitemaps or anything else that would make Google crawl those pages, and thus it could take months for Google to remove those URLs.

The XML attachment sitemap with recent post modified date will make sure that Google spiders all those URLs again. The 410 status code will make sure Google takes them out of its search results in the fastest way possible. After six months the attachment URLs should be gone from the search results. You should then remove the search index purge plugin, and keep the redirect setting of the attachment URLs set to “Yes”.

Thanks!!