Category Pages coming up in Google search results instead of the actual post.

Here’s what Google is telling me…

“Would agree that setting some sort of redirect on the URL would be good. Its clearly some sort of ‘mistake’ page. Looks like the ‘cat=’ forwards it to category listing page handler. but -1 is not a real category. So its then probably just trying to list all posts.  That particular post is the most recent post, but because it not really a ‘category’ page, it rendered by normal page handler, whch ends up putting in canonical etc.  Although perhaps even better would be to ‘fix’ wordpress, so this URL doesnt return content. A the most crude…  <?php if (isset($_GET[‘cat’]) && $_GET[‘cat’] == -1) {      header(‘HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found’);      exit;} 

Or even better would be just the fix the code, as it clearly knows when a category doesnt existhttps://www.aframeforward.com/?cat=1232423523it should do exactly the same for -1In fact it seems does the same for anything <1, eg /?cat=-1232423523 gives the same duplicate.

Possibly do something better than return no content, so that if users end up there it ok. But important is not to return the content of an actual page.  This is better than trying to ‘noindex’ the page, as it risks affecting real pages.”

and…

“Just for reference, I dug a bit in wordpress source. Seems it tries to support negative cat ids, to function as exclude filter  $cat_array = preg_split(‘/[,\s]+/’, $q[‘cat’]);
                        $q[‘cat’] = ”;
                        $req_cats = array();
                        foreach ( (array) $cat_array as $cat ) {
                                $cat = intval($cat);
                                $req_cats[] = $cat;
                                $in = ($cat > 0);
                                $cat = abs($cat);
                                if ( $in ) {
                                        $q[‘category__in’][] = $cat;
                                        $q[‘category__in’] = array_merge( $q[‘category__in’], get_term_children($cat, ‘category’) );
                                } else {
                                        $q[‘category__not_in’][] = $cat;
                                        $q[‘category__not_in’] = array_merge( $q[‘category__not_in’], get_term_children($cat, ‘category’) );
                                }
                        }
 This is from wp-includes/query.php So that is what is being ‘shown’. All posts NOT in category 1! I would guess this is such little known functionality, that your theme, and perhaps even Yoast, is not ‘seeing’ it as a real category page. Hence yoast does not inject the noindex tag, and the rel=canonical is being created incorrectly.  (don’t have Yoast installed to check it source)”

What do you make of this?

Thanks!

Jackson

=D

@jdembowski ?

Wow, never expected that kind of response, and most certainly wasn’t trying to be rude by any means.

As I mentioned above, we did test without the theme and those odd pages are still there. Everyone agreed (Divi, Yoast, Google Webmasters Forum) after that it was indeed a WordPress issue so I was just trying to follow up on that.

I didn’t get a response to my follow ups so I thought maybe it just got lost in the busy shuffle of everyones lives. No big deal. Never realized tagging someone that you were responding to in a thread could be considered a bad thing. I just thought it meant that you were engaging in a conversation with that person.

Thanks for your thoughtfulness and time James. I appreciate it!

I won’t tag anyone ever again now knowing how bad it is. Again, my apologies as I just thought that was how you responded to people on here, as it shows the @ tag handle right next to users name. Figured it was like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Google, etc.

Are you referring to my other post today asking about the negative category pages? If so, I was trying to make a more simplified and different post that could make it easier for people to provide insight, as my original post was much more complex and involved many more variables. Also now knowing that it was indeed a WordPress issue I thought that would be helpful. And because no one was responding I figured my original post must not have been effectively worded and was only creating confusion with the stern response from the moderator, and then her not responding to me after that. I thought that thread was dead as a result of how it, and I, was treated.

I understand the etiquette/expectations here now so thanks for clarifying.

And yeah, I’m hoping someone can provide some insight as to why those pages are being created, and/or how I can eliminate them from being created, or at least how I keep them from showing up in search results. It’s so strange to me that no one knows how the pages are created or why. Truly baffling. Fingers crossed though and thanks again James! =D

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Jackson.

Hmmm, anyone have any ideas how I could best find some help with this?

Other places I could be reaching out to about these /?cat=-1 pages ?

A million thank-yous in advance!

=D