Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge

The purpose of this SEO plugin is to purge attachment URLs out of Google's index as fast as possible. This helps sites that might have suffered from having too many thin content pages in the search index by removing them in the fastest way possible. What does this plugin do? This plugin makes all your attachment URLs return an HTTP 410 status. It then creates an XML sitemap with a recent last modified date, containing all those URLs. The XML sitemap with recent post modified date makes Google spider all those URLs again. The 410 status code makes sure Google takes them out of its search results in the fastest way possible. With a nice trick, we also show end users the actual attachment image, so the user experience is not as poor as when they see an error page. Yoast SEO required This plugin is an extension to Yoast SEO. It requires it to work. How long should you run this plugin? After 6 months the attachment URLs should be gone from the search results. If you then remove the plugin, and keep Yoast SEO's redirect setting on "Yes", you have the best long term behavior for attachment URLs: to redirect to the actual attachment. Does Google condone this? This method has been discussed with and OK'd by Google.

1.1 Release date: June 27th, 2018 Enhancements:

• Excludes attachments from the purge sitemap that were added after activating this plugin. Bugfixes:
• Fixes a bug where the Attachement sitemap has the wrong "Last modified" date, this should be the time the plugin was activated.
• Fixes a bug where the "Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?" can become "No" when saving other settings in Yoast SEO.

1.0 Release date: May 30th, 2018 Initial version.