WordPress.org

1. At Your Service
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   It seems to me that WordPress has automatically generated archive pages for my blog posts, both by category and by month. I wasn't aware that they existed at all until I did a full-on google search on my url and found them!

   I had already created specifically-formatted category and archive pages for my posts and would like to get rid of the ones WordPress created. How do I do that without crashing my site? (I tried to delete archive.php from my theme folder and that was a HUGE mistake.)

   Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

2. esmi
   Theme Diva & Forum Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   You can't "delete" the archive pages as they are only generated by demand. If Google mapped them, then you must have a link to them somewhere on your site.

3. At Your Service
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi Esmi,

   What I know about site mapping could fit on the head of a pin - I'm still in the very early learning stages. So this is probably another very dumb question - but....

   I uploaded XML Sitemap and created a sitemap, so is it possible that those pages were included, since theoretically they exist on my site... somewhere?

   If that's the case, all I would potentially need to do to get rid of them is make sure they were excluded from the sitemap, correct?

   Thanks so much - I really appreciate the help!

4. esmi
   Theme Diva & Forum Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   is it possible that those pages were included

   Only if you have links to them on your site.

5. At Your Service
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Esmi -

   Forgive me for *clearly* not getting this. My web site is called At Your Service and can be found at http://www.buytime4u.com.

   Every day, I post a Quote Of The Day", which then ends up on a category page that I've created myself using Post Page Associator. For example, all quotes that talk about Growing Up appear here: http://buytime4u.com/quotes/growing-up

   However, if I search google for "www.buytime4u.com" or type the following url directly into my browser, a page comes up that also lists all of these quotes, only it's just an unformatted list and I definitely didn't create it:
   http://buytime4u.com/category/quotes/growing-up

   This page also doesn't exist anywhere on my site, as far as I can tell. (It doesn't appear in my Pages list and there are no links to it.) Here is what the search result shows in Google:
   Growing Up (Instead of Just Older) | At Your Service - buytime4u.com
   Oct 17, 2010 ... Please email us at info@buytime4u.com and we'll be happy to send you back an Excel or Word version. Logo designed by Shana M. Burns ...
   buytime4u.com/category/quotes-of-the-day/growing-up - Cached

   I am also using the SEO Ultimate Plug-In and have just set it to prevent indexing across the board and also checked the box on the Spider Instructions tab so that the site will not be cached or archived. Sadly, this hasn't helped.

   Google search results also show archive pages and individual post pages, neither of which I set up.

   Would it help if I edited the code out of these templates: archive.php, category.php, and single.php?

   Thanks again - I am so confused....

6. esmi
   Theme Diva & Forum Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Would it help if I edited the code out of these templates: archive.php, category.php, and single.php?

   No - these are needed by your theme. Plus WP will just default to using index.php for these pages.

   However, if I search google for "www.buytime4u.com" or type the following url directly into my browser, a page comes up that also lists all of these quotes

   Google

   Using http://www.buytime4u.com simply brings up your site.

7. At Your Service
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Yes, absolutely - but if you click on the link below the first few hits and show all the results, the phantom indexed pages also show up, along with individual post pages. (Which is not how I've set up my site.)

   However.... I think the problem has to do with my sitemap, which I'm now working on. I working on figuring out how to exclude the necessary pages and think I'm having good luck with the XML-Sitemap Generator plug-in. It may be that I can never get rid of them, but I can keep them hidden permanently!

   Thanks so much for all of your help! I need a few days to make sure that the pages have disappeared from Google now that I've reset everything, then will come back and mark this as resolved.

   Esmi, YOU ROCK!!

8. esmi
   Theme Diva & Forum Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Glad I managed to help - one way or another. :-)

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