Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all the responses!

At the moment I am serving the 410's using the .htaaccess file as I removed the actual pages a while ago. The pages don't show in most searches, however, two of them do show up in some instances under the sitelinks which is the main pain. I manually asked for them to be removed using 'remove urls' however that only last a couple of months and they are now back.

So I guess the best way is to recreate the pages and insert a noindex?

Thanks again for everyone time, it's much appreciated.

Hi all, this is my first post so be kind - I have a one page Wordpress site that has the Yoast plugin installed. Unfortunately, when I first submitted the site's XML sitemap to the Google Search Console, I didn't check the Yoast settings and it submitted some example files from a theme demo I was using. These got indexed, which is a pain, so now I am trying to remove them. Originally I did a bunch of 301's but that didn't remove them from (at least not after about a month) - so now I have set up 410's - These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.