wilhelmf

The plugin at my website has been updated all this time and I believe that was exactly the problem. When users updated the plugin (in 2018), they often encountered the bug in Yoast’s system. The photos were then provided by Yoast as separate (empty) attachment pages with a photo on it. These attachment pages are not listed in the WP dashboard. Its existence is therefore not immediately noticeable.

You write that my website is not affected? It seems to me that if Google Search Console crawled 3800 pages and I only created 1050, this is a serious problem. Search Sonsole had created 3 additional sitemaps for these attachment pages. There is currently only 1 sitemap listed in Search Console with just over 1070 pages. Several hundred attachment pages are probably still indexed by Google.

I just hope that the attachment files will be removed by Google the coming months now that they are no longer accessible in the sitemap. I think the Google removal tool for URLs is only for 6 months.

People who want to read more about this Yoast bug it can visit this authority site: searchenginejournal.com/yoast-plugin-bug/255639