This is to be expected as the purge plugin makes all the media (attachment) pages to 410 content deleted to remove all of these from the search results. So, the crawl errors you are seeing in the search results are perfectly normal. You can ignore this.
Installing this plugin will do the following two things:
- Every attachment URL will return a 410 status code.
- A static XML sitemap, containing all the attachment URLs on a given site will be created. The post modified date for each of those URLs is the activation date and time of the plugin.
- The XML 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”.
Thread Starter
ryania
(@ryania)
Thank you.
Is it safe for me to mark them as fixed on GSC? I don’t want the entries cluttering up things.
Yes it is safe to mark the attachment URL crawl errors as fixed. Please note that these may re-appear in GSC and we have more information on this here: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/why-are-404-errors-returning-even-after-being-marked-as-fixed/
