Any ideas why? ??

Hello,
HAppy New Year to All!

Recently used this purge plugins thinking it would resolve the many soft 404 and crawl anamoly. I understand now, it is not the plugins function. However, the plugin should not cause product images to be deindex from google image search! It’s function if to deindex attachment/ images from actual google search results, not from the google image search!

Before using the yoast purge plugins, I had houndreds of product images on google image search results. If you clicked on the image it would take you to the actual product page, not the image urls, which in the case of ecommerce site, it is perfect.

This plugin should have not been use on our site, we didn’t have attachment urls indexed in google search results, however, did and still have a large amount of soft 404 and crawl anamoly related to image urls on our google search console. Since this plugins stated it will not harm the site, it was implemented with negative results. The plugin cause product images to get deindex from google images due to the 410 gone status code.

Please, how do we get all our product images reidexed in google images again?
As of now, the plugin was deleted. I verified the attachment mapping is no longer in the sitemap. I verified the attachment urls are no longer 410, they’re 301 to image url 200 status code. on Yoast seo image appearance it’s set to yes, redirect.

Is it safe to remove this plugin now?
Thanks

I installed the Search index purge plug-in one year ago. There are still 968 image pages showing in Search Console as either not found (404) or as “Submitted URL has crawl issue”. These peaked at about 1030 some time last year.

On this page https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/ the text says:

“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”.”

It’s been a year. Does this mean I have to be patient, or does it mean the purge isn’t going to work for me? Or have I done something wrong here?

Yoast asked me to click a link to speed up my site yesterday and I haven’t been able to access the back-end since.

How can we generate a list of nginx redirect rules to install. Our caching system bypasses PHP so the plugin is not working reliably for us to clean this up.

We have a file we import into nginx already for redirects, we just need the list of redirects this plugin generates exported.

Thanks

Could someone please explain the significance of this PHP message:
PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /blahblah/wp-content/plugins/yoast-seo-search-index-purge/src/Yoast_Purge_Attachment_Page_Server.php:46) in /blahblah/wp-content/plugins/wp-content-security-policy/includes/WP_CSP.php on line 548
This message is displayed regularly in the web server error log. It occurs principally when a search engine spider visits my site.
Is there something I should do to avoid this warning?

Hi yoast,
Can you help me why myhome page sitemap url not modified? You can see pict below:
Sitemap by Yoast

I use Yoast latest premium
Thanks sorry for mybad english.

Hi the pages didn’t exist but do in google cache have removed thousands but keep popping up as cached so would this help with that?
Thanks

Hello!

I followed Yoast’s directions for media attachment pages months ago. However, I didn’t download the Search Index plugin until about 2 months ago. Is it normal that NEW media attachments are still showing up as 404 errors even after implementing the first change? It doesn’t seem okay to me but I’m new to all of this.

Here’s are two examples of 404s I found in my Google search console for two different and brand new posts that were published AFTER I made sure the media attachment was toggled correctly:

https://www.fashionedible.com/beautiful-places-in-italy/mostbeautifulplacesinitaly23/.

https://www.fashionedible.com/2-week-europe-itinerary/best2weekeuropeanitineraries1/

I looked through other questions in support and haven’t found anything exactly like this issue. I did see another question that support answered mentioning sitemaps and I’m wondering if mine is to blame as I have several that appear under my Yoast sitemaps. Thanks!

I’m getting a lot of issues mail from google after installing this plugin.

I’m curious why there is a render_file function in /src/Yoast_Purge_Attachment_Page_Server.php.

When sending a HTTP 410 Gone response the response don’t have to contain any content because this response is indicating that the ressource is not found on the server and the server doesn’t know a fallback.

If you want to show the image you should send a HTTP 301 Header with the correct location. This header should also contain no content.

Hi,

I have installed and activated this plugin. How long this plugin will take to return 4XX for all the attachment URLs? Is there any way to check how this is working?

Thanks

I’m a little bit confused.
I see that your plugin force the attachment pages to have a http 410 Gone header.
If the ressource is gone, there should be no content, but instead the attachment is shown.
As explained on https://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html the response is intended to tell the client, that the server knows that this ressource is no longer available and does not have a redirect.
Therefore I think the redirect code has to be 302 Redirect permanent which points to the correct url of the image.
e.g. https://www.bimarkt.de/cms/home/attachment/bimarkt-start-bg/ should point to https://www.bimarkt.de/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/bimarkt-start-bg.jpg

• This topic was modified 6 years ago by mumbomedia.

Hello,

We were affected by the Yoast bug that triggered hundreds of crawl errors for media attachments on our site. We installed the purge plugin but are still seeing errors 9 months later – despite Yoast saying it would only take 6 months. Please advise how we can resolve this asap.

Thanks for your help!

I reached out to Premium Support, and this is their reply. So this is hopefully of some use to others…

The article that was published with the introduction of the SEO Purge plugin mentions that 6 months after installation the problem would have been resolved.

My search console shows no progress at all. There is no decline in the number of errors. Errors are not listed as ‘410’ but instead as ‘crawl issue’ or ‘404’.

Is there some way for me to verify if the plugin is working as expected.

In another thread I read that the errors can be marked as fixed as soon as the intended URL is removed from the index but how should I know when the URL is removed from the index?

The plugin is causing Google Webmaster for the site to report the purged attachments as 404 errors.

I have installed this plugin when it was first published and have read the various articles explaining the problem and the solution. What I do not understand is whether what I see on the Google console reflects the work of this plugin or not. So I am asking here for an explanation of what I am seeing.

First of all, I note that the site map created by Yoast SEO contains a sub-map, attachment-sitemap.xml, with all the attachments, i.e., all the images I use (220). I note, too, that on the Google Search Console, under Crawl | Sitemaps, there are 46 warnings, consisting of a series of 404 and 410 errors. I note, finally, that there is no apparent way in Yoast SEO to stop including the attachments in the site map.

So what is happening? Is this what is supposed to be happening? Does it takes months and months (years?) to remove all those attachment links from the Google search index? And when and if they are ever removed, what purpose would attachment-sitemap.xml have? Or have I completely misunderstood the issues and what I am seeing has nothing to do with getting rid of the attachment links from Google search?

Many thanks in advance.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Ambyomoron.

Hi there,

Despite the fact that I installed this plugin when It was released, I still have many attachment urls indexed in Google. Now all the urls in the sitemap have 2018-07-02 as their last modified time.

In order to make google crawl those links again, I want to update that data manually. I tried to remove and then reinstall the plugin, but it didn’t help.

Could you please advise how I can change that date to a newer time so things get resolved sooner?

Much appreciated

• This topic was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by moemauphie.

Is it possible to use your plugin without yoast ? I mean install it as stand alone plugin and install it to use only this feature on my blog? Thanks!

Hi,

I appreciate your help. We have submitted about 1600 images but indexed only 2 images. Before we have indexes about 1200 images. We need to fix it.

Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge – when we activated the plugin in the sitemap is new attachment-sitemap.xml 6 links with images. When we deactivate plugin attachment-sitemap.xml is missing from our sitemaps. What is the best solution? Activate or deactivate.

I really appreciate your help.

Thanks,
Tomas

I believe I followed the directions on using the purge plugin correctly. But when you spotcheck the attachments sitemap certain URL’s serve the image, certain redirect to the page and some serve 404 errors.

I’d appreciate some help on this as a large chunk of traffic was lost.

Thanks

Started yesterday getting WSOD only on page building with Divi. Was able to access site and also admin area, create posts.
Today I deactivated every plugin, reactivated and tested. Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge was the only one that made the site show a WSOD after activating.

All plugins, files and themes updated. I am not sure what has changed in the last couple of days as there were no updates that I noticed would have had any effect.

HI,

Pls. visit tuikart.com we have also hit by more than 75% of traffic because of Media file bug.

When updated the yoast seo search index purge plugin then it has converted all media file urls to 404 instead of 410.

Pls. check one for the xml files: https://www.tuikart.com/attachment-sitemap9.xml

Pls. help urgently.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by piyushdear. Reason: more clarification

Hi! I’ve activated the plugin for a while…and have received 3064 410 crawl errors as of 9/4. Now its 9/9 and they have gone down to 2391. Does this mean it’s working?

Thanks!
Sveva Marcangeli

Hi,

I had the issue resulting from the Yoast bug so I installed and activated the purge plugin back in June, as advised. This is the site https://www.digitaldavidson.co.uk/

From Search Console I can see there are just 20 Web pages still indexed, and 4 images. This was 28 and 4 respectively last week, so I can see they are gradually being removed from the index, so that’s great. I seem to recall reading that this can take up to 6 months.

My question is, when there are no attachment pages left in the index, will they no longer appear in my sitemap https://www.digitaldavidson.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml (now I’ve changed the settings as advised, and do I at that stage remove the purge plugin, and mark all the related attachment errors in my Crawl Errors Search Console report as fixed (knowing they shouldn’t appear again if they’re not in the sitemap)?

Many thanks,
Nathan

Hi,

I tried this plugin for a site of a multisite network, but after activating the plugin for that particular sub-site, the settings of the Media tab are not being overridden.

Is this plugin supposed to work on MultiSite Networks too?

Thanks in advance for your support

Looking for some clarification on the Yoast Purge Plugin…

– Applied the plugin 2 months ago
– Sitting on about 279 crawl errors in search console that have been static now for several weeks. I’m assuming that’s what is supposed to happen and now we are to wait up to 6 months for Google to remove them.

In searching comments on the original “announcement” regarding this issue made by Yoast, I read the following from two different users: (on the same post)

“”Am I correct in thinking that Google Search Console will keep reporting errors for the 410s as long as the purge plugin and attachment-sitemap.xml are in place because the sitemap will keep on pointing to non-existing pages?

Furthermore – when the result of the google query “site:https://mydomain.com/ inurl:attachment_id” is nearing zero, is it then the right time to remove the purge plugin and related attachment-sitemap.xml? Yes, I have noted the comments about “six months”, but isn’t the result of the query above the best measure, and when it’s zero’ed, then we’re good?””
(to which Yoast replied, “yes & yes — you’ve understood it perfectly”)

The second comment was in response to someone asking about the same search in reference to the attachment url(s) but he had never actually installed the plugin:

IF
““Your search – site:https://mydomain.com/ inurl:attachment_id – did not match any documents.”
…then you’re likely all good, as the problematic slim content pages have not been indexed by Google.

Just make sure that you have 1) a recent / latest version of the Yoast standard plugin that has the discussed bug corrected and 2) the setting “redirect attachment URLs” set to “yes”, and you won’t need the additional purge plugin.””

NOW, based on the above, do I understand that so long as the plugin is activated, those 410 pages will SIT there? And for as long as they sit there, Google will report them as errors? (until Google removes them)

Also, when I implement the search, “site:https://mydomain.com/ inurl:attachment_id,” I too get the message “did not match any documents.” Which is another reason I am trying to determine if I can take the next steps.

All that said, I have 3 questions:

1. What would happen if I remove the plugin at this point? What would happen to those 279 errors? Is there ANY harm I can do by deactivating it now?

2. IF the plugin has done what it is supposed to do (no additional 410 errors) wouldn’t it make sense to remove it now or do I need to wait until Google removes the 410s at some point in time?

3. IF I can deactivate it, can I then just mark all of the errors in Search Console as “fixed” and then remove the attachment sitemap too?

I’m just trying to get some clarification here! I understand the waiting 6 months thing — I do! However, if the process has run its course already and now we’re just sitting and waiting for Google to run its, is it okay to remove things sooner rather than later?

I am an admitted novice and I just want to do the right thing. Any direction with regard to any of the above would be most graciously and humbly welcome.

Thank you most kindly!!

It seems I have a lot of image attachment pages that aren’t attached to specific pages/posts.

So Yoast didn’t list them in the attachment XML and redirects aren’t working since they have nothing to redirect to.

I know I can export media attachments/files in an XML but the document is not useable given my Excel knowledge.

Is there an easy way to get a list of all the URL’s for unattached image attachment pages?

Note: it would be really great if this plugin could provide a solution for this.

Cheers,
Adam

I get this error when I attempt to update Yoast SEO: Search index purge
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403 Forbidden

A potentially unsafe operation has been detected in your request to this site.

Generated by Wordfence at Mon, 2 Jul 2018 1:55:46 GMT.
Your computer’s time: Mon, 02 Jul 2018 01:55:48 GMT.
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Running WP 4.9.6
Wordfence Version 7.1.8
Yoast SEO: Search index purge Version 1.0.0