Media links in attachment-sitemap.xml are bypassing “noindex” option of post

I recently started using “noindex” option depending on the post content to prevent them being indexed by Google. Google started reporting errors with exactly these pages as they were being submitted by the sitemaps but couldn’t be crawled due to “noindex” meta on them.

Upon investigating the sitemaps, I found that the actual /post-sitemap.xml is not carrying those link but when looked closely on those Google console errors, the links were not exact post links but they were media attachment links. When I checked the attachment-sitemap.xml as I am publishing that media sitemaps as well, that sitemap indeed includes all the posts links which were set to “noindex”

I am not sure if it’s a normal and intended behavior of attachment sitemaps and they should really not take care of the “noindex” option but just publish those links without any checks?

If these links are supposed to be in attachment-sitempap.xml then how would I take care of the errors being reported by Google console?

• This topic was modified 7 years ago by khurramar.