How to handle pages I can't delete?
-
Hello Mozzers,
I am using wordpress and I have a small problem. I have two sites, I don't want but the dev of the theme told me I can't delete them.
/portfolio-items/
/faq-items/
The dev said he can't find a way to delete it because these pages just list faqs/portfolio posts. I don't have any of these posts so basically what I have are two sites with just the title "Portfolio items" and "FAQ Items". Furthermore the dev said these sites are auto-generated so he can't find a way to remove them.
I mean I don't believe that it's impossible, but if it is how should I handle them? They are indexed by search engines, should I remove them from the index and block them from robots.txt?
Thanks in advance.
-
great!
-
The code worked fine, thanks again for your help!
-
Most likely, but I would double check with your developer - since I might be unaware of anything out of the ordinary!
-
Thank you for your answer! Can I use this code in the .htaccess?:
Redirect 301 /portfolio-items/ http://mysite.com
-
Great - the info helps. To be honest, this isn't a huge issue if left alone, or if you do the redirect. But if you're worried about users landing on the wrong page, you can 301 redirect to the homepage and that should be just fine.
-
They told me this:
Salman wrote:
Hi There,
These are not pages or posts which you can remove by just clicking on a button. These are custom posts types and you can not directly remove slugs within current setup. You have following options though.
-
Add some code to unregister these custom post types.
-
Use a plugin to re-write slugs
-
Use .htaccess to redirect users when this URL is access. This might work
BEGIN REMOVE SLUG CUSTOM POST TYPE RULES
RewriteRule ^portfolio-items/(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^faq-items/(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]END REMOVE SLUG CUSTOM POST TYPE RULES
I hope you understand that the solution you need is not possible with our current set of options and will require some customization of the theme. We’d love to help you with this customization but we are only able to provide support for basic theme issues and bug fixes. We do provide support for small customizations but unfortunately this request is beyond that.
There aren't any similar pages, I guess I 301 redirect them to the home page. It's three pages, will this have any negative effects?
Thanks for the help, highly appreciated!
-
-
If you can't delete them, you should probably 301 redirect them to the most similar page, or just the homepage. You can redirect them in the .htaccess file or use a redirection plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
-
Thanks for all the answers! Sorry, I didn't have a chance to respond earlier.
Unfortunately, I still couldn't fix this. I talked to the original devs (on their support forums) and they couldn't help me further with this. It's about these 3 pages:
/themefusion_es_groups/group1/
/portfolio-items/
/faq-items/
I don't know what else I could try..
Best regards!
-
Hi There
Just checking, any luck with this? Can you clarify what you mean by "sites"? Those both look like sub-folders? Can you explain a little more in context how they fit into whatever domain you're on?
-
Where are they linked FROM? Are they pulled in a menu or a sidebar or are they linked internally somewhere else? If they are not being used, you simply need to delete links to them and they will disappear.
-
You an either block them via the robots.txt file or just 301 redirect them to the sites homepage or an applicable page.
I would just 301 redirect them.
Thanks,
Jake
-
Hi,
Quite interesting what you developer says There is no such thing in Wordpress as Impossible, but let's say if there is no other way to handle it, you could download the Yoast plugin (wordpress seo) and set those pages to noindex, follow and from robots.txt disallow access to the two pages.
Still I would check what is causing the "auto-generated" pages. If it is a bought theme, go ask the original developer. I'm quite sure that there will be an easy way to fix it. (drop me a private message and we can check it out together)
Gr., Keszi
Later Edit: Hint: Maybe you (or your developer) should check into the custom post types.
-
If those pages are being created due to those being tag options you should try deleting the tag to see if it stops wordpress from generating the page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Blog page won't get indexed
Hi Guys, I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now. I found this in the robots.txt file: Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/ I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Site hacked, but can't find the code
Discovered some really odd words ranking for us in WMT. Looked further and found pages like this www.pdnseek.com/wll/canadian-24-hour-pharmacy. When you click it it redirects to the home page. The developers can't find /wll anywhere on the site. The pages are indexed and cached. Looked at the back links in moz and found many backlinks to our site from other sites using URLs like this. The host says there is nothing on the server, but where else could it be. We've run virus scans, nothing, looked through source code, nothing. Anyone with some idea? www.pdnseek.com is the URL
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
Should you use the canonicalization tag when the content isn't exactly a duplicate?
We have a site that pull data from different sources with unique urls onto a main page and we are thinking about using the canonicalization tag to keep those source pages from being indexed and to give any authority to the main page. But this isn’t really what canonicalization is supposed to be used for so I’m unsure of if this is the right move.
Technical SEO | | Fuel
To give some more detail: We manage a site that has pages for individual golf courses. On the golf course page in addition to other general information we have sections on that page that show “related articles” and “course reviews”.
We may only show 4 or 5 on each of those courses pages per page, but we have hundreds of related articles and reviews for each course. So below “related articles” on the course page we have a link to “see more articles” that would take the user to a new page that is simply a aggregate page that houses all the article or review content related to that course.
Since we would rather have the overall course page rank in SERPs rather than the page that lists these articles, we are considering canonicalizing the aggregate news page up to the course page.
But, as I said earlier, this isn’t really what the canonicalization tag is intended for so I’m hesitant.
Has anyone else run across something like this before? What do you think?0 -
GWT Malware notification for meta noindex'ed pages ?
I was wondering if GWT will send me Malware notification for pages that are tagged with meta noindex ? EG: I have a site with pages like example.com/indexed/content-1.html
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George
example.com/indexed/content-2.html
example.com/indexed/content-3.html
....
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html
.... Here all the pages like the ones below, are tagged with meta noindex and does not show up in search.
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html Now one fine day example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html page on the site gets hacked and starts to serve malware, none of the other pages are affected .. Will GWT send me a warning for this ? What if the pages are blocked by Robots.txt instead of meta noindex ? Regard
Saijo UPDATE hope this helps someone else : https://plus.google.com/u/0/109548904802332365989/posts/4m17sUtPyUS0 -
Deleting 30,000 pages all at once - good idea or bad idea?
We have 30,000 pages that we want to get rid of. Each product within our database has it's own page. And these particular 30,000 products are not relevant anymore. They have very little content on them and are basically the same exact page but with a few title changes. We no longer want them weighing down our database so we are going to delete them. My question is - should we get rid of them in smaller batches like 2,000 pages at a time, or is it better to get rid of all them in one fell swoop? Which is least likely to raise a flag to Google? Anyone have any experience with this?
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Mask links with JS that point to noindex'ed paged
Hi, in an effort to prepare our page for the Panda we dramatically reduced the number of pages that can be indexed (from 100k down to 4k). All the remaining pages are being equipped with unique and valuable content. We still have the other pages around, since they represent searches with filter combination which we deem are less interesting to the majority of users (hence they are not indexed). So I am wondering if we should mask links to these non-indexed pages with JS, such that Link-Juice doesn't get lost to those. Currently the targeted pages are non-index via "noindex, follow" - we might de-index them with robots.txt though, if the "site:" query doesn't show improvements. Thanks, Sebastian
Technical SEO | | derderko0