We’ve been using the Yoast SEO plugin for a while, and about 7-8 months ago, we activated the option to redirect media URLs to file URL.

We also have Search Index Purge plugin activated. However, Google Search Console keeps on returning the “Submitted URL not found (404)” error for our attachment URLs. At the beginning, we though it’d take some time, but far from getting better, the number of URLs affected by this error is growing.

How can we stop this from happening?

Thanks

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?

When you announced the attachment id error, I installed the “Yoast SEO: Search index purge” plugin. Our website was affected by this error and rankings dropped horrendously at the time.

In Google Search Console, I still have around 200x “Submitted URL has crawl issue” all listing attachment_id=URLS.

In my Yoast XML sitemap, it is displaying the /attachment-sitemap.xml

I am still confused with this entire issue but wanted to know:

1) If this attachment-sitemap.xml should be listing?
2) When can I remove the Search index purge plugin
3) Should i “Validate” all the attachment_id crawl errors?
3) Is everything ok with my site, since I have no clue if everything in Yoast is working fine.

Kind regards

I also use the Yoast SEO: Search index purge – plugin.
But my site is a childrens story site with hundreds of images and all of these, whether tiny or big, have got an abusive url by Yoast. The visits to my site halved!! After installing your index-purge not a lot changed, alas! Every morning I check my Wordfence plugin for live traffic, and I am for a quarter of an hour busy checking all the url’s the many crawlers check out. This is a disaster.

Can your Index-purge plugin perform any faster?

Googling shows 419 pages. Thought that was strange since I should have around 200.

I checked my sitemap to see if anything weird was in it and was fine.
https://www.funcabinrentals.com/sitemap.xml

Under Yoast SEO – Search Appearance -Media –
Media & attachment URLs – Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?

That is set to yes.

wordpress & Yoast are using latest version.

So here is one example of about 200 url’s that have this issue:

This is the page that should be indexed by Google:
https://www.funcabinrentals.com/chatom-vineyards/

The page above (chatom-vineyards) is indexed by Google but another page below (chatom-vineyards-2) is also indexed in Google & I assume was created by Yoast SEO? It should not be indexed.
https://www.funcabinrentals.com/chatom-vineyards/chatom-vineyards-2/

It appears Yoast is 301 redirecting (chatom-vineyards-2) to this:
https://www.funcabinrentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/chatom-vineyards.jpg

You can see redirect using this tool – https://wheregoes.com/

How can I get the 200 url’s out of Google index fast? It’s causing thin content issues for my site:
https://www.funcabinrentals.com/chatom-vineyards/chatom-vineyards-2/

It is default behavior of every cache plugin to cache all pages and there is no option to exclude attachment pages from being cached.

I presume that all cache plugins consider attachment pages as normal WordPress post or pages.

Hope to see a fix around this.