Change 404 to 410

Hi Peter,

Thanks for this plugin, it looks like just what i need.

Would you please consider changing the response from 404 to 410?

The trouble with 404 is that if attachment pages have already been indexed, then 404 won’t necessarily remove them as 404 leaves open the possibility that the resource could return at some point.

410 is a better response in such cases as it means the resource is permanently gone. After a few months Google should stop trying to access the resource, whereas with a 404 response it could continue trying indefinitely.

I don’t use it, but this is why the Yoast extension (https://wordpress.org/plugins/yoast-seo-search-index-purge/) returns the 410 response instead of 404.

Thanks