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Googlebot and other spiders are searching for odd links in our website trying to understand why, and what to do about it.
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I recently began work on an existing Wordpress website that was revamped about 3 months ago. https://thedoctorwithin.com. I'm a bit new to Wordpress, so I thought I should reach out to some of the experts in the community.Checking ‘Not found’ Crawl Errors in Google Search Console, I notice many irrelevant links that are not present in the website, nor the database, as near as I can tell. When checking the source of these irrelevant links, I notice they’re all generated from various pages in the site, as well as non-existing pages, allegedly in the site, even though these pages have never existed.
For instance:
- https://thedoctorwithin.com/category/seminars/newsletters/page/7/newsletters/page/3/feedback-and-testimonials/ allegedly linked from:
- https://thedoctorwithin.com/category/seminars/newsletters/page/7/newsletters/page/3/ (doesn’t exist)
In other cases, these goofy URLs are even linked from the sitemap. BTW - all the URLs in the sitemap are valid URLs.
Currently, the site has a flat structure. Nearly all the content is merely URL/content/ without further breakdown (or subdirectories). Previous site versions had a more varied page organization, but what I'm seeing doesn't seem to reflect the current page organization, nor the previous page organization.
Had a similar issue, due to use of Divi's search feature. Ended up with some pretty deep non-existent links branching off of /search/, such as:
- https://thedoctorwithin.com/search/newsletters/page/2/feedback-and-testimonials/feedback-and-testimonials/online-continuing-education/consultations/ allegedly linked from:
- https://thedoctorwithin.com/search/newsletters/page/2/feedback-and-testimonials/feedback-and-testimonials/online-continuing-education/ (doesn't exist).
I blocked the /search/ branches via robots.txt. No real loss, since neither /search/ nor any of its subdirectories are valid.
There are numerous pre-existing categories and tags on the site. The categories and tags aren't used as pages. I suspect Google, (and other engines,) might be creating arbitrary paths from these. Looking through the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing the same behavior from Bing, Moz and other spiders, as well.
I suppose I could use Search Console to remove URL/category/ and URL/tag/. I suppose I could do the same, in regards to other legitimate spiders / search engines. Perhaps it would be better to use Mod Rewrite to lead spiders to pages that actually do exist.
- Looking forward to suggestions about best way to deal with these errant searches.
- Also curious to learn about why these are occurring.
Thank you.
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Thanks, Kevin.
Glad I'm not the only one.
Disabling tags and categories aren't an option, in my case. Guess I need to look at more of the potential upside. Seems tags and categories, if handled correctly, could provide a new way to engage visitors and search engines.
I've heard people refer to 'spidering budgets, or whatnot'. Guess it's an entirely new topic of discussion... if limiting the spurious spider searching, (from good spiders,) means that said spiders will spend more time on the conventional pathways of a site.
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Thanks, Vjay.
Did a lot of work fixing links in the database.
The issue was occurring even before implementation of WP super cache, and before the link fixing.
Being new-ish to WP, it seems strange that it's so willing to:
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provide access via directories that don't really exist:
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categories, tags, even search, if using a theme-provided site search.
I'm getting better at .htaccess, so I'm able to handle a lot of the old incoming links fairly well. In the case of these weird 'in the mind of the spiders' links, will be try to address these as well.
Thanks for your advice about 404 and 301 plugins. Time to look around and see what other useful tools are out there.
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I have the same issue, I have stopped using tags because of all the irrelevant links they cause. Looking forward to reading the comments on this thread.
KJr
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Hi There,
Your website is built on WordPress and it looks like that there might be spurious entries in the DB, which might also not be getting deleted due to the WP super cache plugin. You may try to empty your cache and install 'all 404 redirect' and 301 management plugins.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Vijay
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