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
-
Webmaster tools Hentry showing pages that don't exist
In Webmaster Tools I have a ton of pages listed under Structured Data >> Hentry. These pages are not on my website and I don't know where they are coming from. I redid the site for someone and perhaps they are from the old site. How do I find and delete these? Thank you Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Can I use high ranking sites to push my competitors out of the first page of search results?
I'm looking at a bunch of long tail low traffic keywords that aren't difficult to rank for. As I was idly doing a boring task my mind wandered and I thought.... Why don't I ask lots of questions about these keywords on sites such as Moz, Quora, Reddit etc where the high DA will get them to rank for the search term? The results on a SEO site or Q&A site won't be relevant and so I'd starve my competitors of some of their leads. Of course I'm not sure the effort would be worth it but would it work? (and no, none of my long tail keywords are included in this post)
Technical SEO | | Zippy-Bungle3 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
I always get this error "We have detected that the domain or subfolder does not respond to web requests." I don't know why. PLEASE help
subdomain www.nwexterminating.com subfolder www.nwexterminating.com/pest_control www.nwexterminating.com/termite_services www.nwexterminating.com/bed_bug_services
Technical SEO | | NWExterminating0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Why hasn't my sites indexed on opensiteexplorer.org changed in weeks?
Why hasn't my sites indexed on opensiteexplorer.org changed in weeks, even though I've done link-building like crazy?
Technical SEO | | AccountKiller0