Molongui creating Tens of Thousands of Phantom Author Pages

  • Resolved timmytimbucktu

    (@timmytimbucktu)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hello,

    Google has significantly increased its indexing of my site. On January 14 alone, over 21,000 pages were indexed.

    Reviewing the logs, I noticed Google is indexing excessively deep author pages — specifically for guest authors. A guest author with a single post somehow has hundreds of associated archive pages.

    These pages are all duplicate content. For example, /author/author-1/page/61/ is identical to /author/author-2/page/61/. It appears that Molongui is generating these phantom author archive pages. With over 800 guest authors and hundreds of archive pages each, this seems to have led to tens of thousands of unnecessary pages being created.

    Google is indexing all of these pages, overloading my server, resulting in my site being shut down temporarily, and it is at risk of being shut down again. Scrapers bots active on my site also went into overdrive, creating a compound effect. I’ve blocked all them, but Google is still indexing this never-ending stream of pages.

    Checking the Molongui plugin changelog, I see there was a major update on January 14.

    I should also note that my Pro subscription expired some time ago, yet the legitimate author archives remained accessible — until this update. My hypothesis is that the plugin revoked the previously created author archives and then “replaced” them with the generic post archive pages, for each of the 800+ guest authors.

    With nearly 1600 posts and 8 posts per archive pages, there’s about 154 archive pages right now. So with 800+ guest authors, that’s means there’s about over 100,000 dummy pages have been created that Google will try to index. Seems like a ticking time bomb that may not only crash my site for good but create huge indexing challenges due to errors, duplicate/thin content, and then issues with deindexing or getting errors. Really need a resolution here soon. Thank you.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author Molongui

    (@molongui)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hi @timmytimbucktu,

    Thank you for reaching out with these details. I understand the urgency of the issue, and I’ll do my best to help resolve it. Could you please:

    1. Share the link to one of your Guest Author page so we can check?
    2. Use the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin to disable all plugins and switch to a default WP theme and check if the duplicate paginated pages issue persists?

    Please let us know so we can assist.

    Thread Starter timmytimbucktu

    (@timmytimbucktu)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hello,

    Here’s an example:

    https://globelynews.com/author/thomas-fingar/page/154/

    Plugin Author Molongui

    (@molongui)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Thanks for that! Your sitemap.xml doesn’t contain links to guest author archives. Since author archives use pagination and lack noindex tags, Google is crawling and indexing these pages. Since you are using Yoast SEO, here’s how you can prevent paginated pages from being crawled: Go to SEO > Search Appearance > Archives and enable “Noindex paginated archive pages“.

    We’ve noticed that your canonical tag for that guest author archive page is currently pointing to https://news.google.com/swg/, which is likely incorrect. Could you please check your Yoast SEO settings and verify that canonical tags are correctly pointing to the main author archive URL?

    The duplicate content issue arises because guest author archive pages (e.g., https://globelynews.com/author/thomas-fingar/) are showing the same posts as your homepage, just in a different layout. This means posts are not being filtered by author. This could be happening because:

    a) You might need to refresh your permalinks. Go to Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes.

    b) The Guest Authors feature might be disabled in the plugin settings page. Check the Molongui Authorship settings to ensure it’s enabled.

    c) the version of the Molongui Authorship Pro you’re running might be outdated and incompatible with the latest version of the free plugin.

    Let me know if you need help with any of these steps or if you’d like further clarification.

    Thread Starter timmytimbucktu

    (@timmytimbucktu)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    [[ Since you are using Yoast SEO, here’s how you can prevent paginated pages from being crawled: Go to SEO > Search Appearance > Archives and enable “Noindex paginated archive pages“. ]]

    I think this is outdated. Do you mean go into crawl optimization? Anyway, I want paginated archive pages, like Categories and Tags, to be indexed.

    [[We’ve noticed that your canonical tag for that guest author archive page is currently pointing to https://news.google.com/swg/, which is likely incorrect. Could you please check your Yoast SEO settings and verify that canonical tags are correctly pointing to the main author archive URL.]]

    I don’t see any settings for this in Yoast.

    [[ a) You might need to refresh your permalinks. Go to Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes.]]

    I saved changes though there were no changes made. Did not impact anything.

    [[ b) The Guest Authors feature might be disabled in the plugin settings page. Check the Molongui Authorship settings to ensure it’s enabled. ]]

    Guest Authors feature was already enabled. Author Pages also remains enabled.

    [[ c) the version of the Molongui Authorship Pro you’re running might be outdated and incompatible with the latest version of the free plugin. ]]

    Ok? I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do now. Our site is at risk of being shut down because of the server load.

    Plugin Author Molongui

    (@molongui)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    If you’re using an outdated version of Molongui Authorship Pro, it might not be compatible with the latest free plugin version. Please update to the latest version of Molongui Authorship Pro. That could address the guest author pages not filtering posts by author.

    To prevent your site from being shut down due to server overload, you could take these steps:

    1.- Block Bots: Add this to your .htaccess file to block aggressive bots:

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Bingbot|Yahoo! Slurp) [NC]
        RewriteRule .* - [R=403,L]

        2.- Limit Crawl Rate in Google Search Console. Go to Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Rate and temporarily reduce the crawl rate to ease server load.

        3.- Enable Caching. Use a caching plugin to reduce server load.

        Please let us know.

        Thread Starter timmytimbucktu

        (@timmytimbucktu)

        1 year, 3 months ago

        I deactivated the Pro plugin and the phantom pages immediately disappeared.

        My subscription lapsed, so I’m unable to update the Pro version.

        I like the plugin, but given that the bug or conflict caused by your set of plugins made my website a ticking time bomb and cost us a lot in work hours and revenue, and may after other collateral damage, I have no inclination to pay you more money after this.

        Plugin Author Molongui

        (@molongui)

        1 year, 3 months ago

        Thank you for sharing your experience, and we’re truly sorry to hear about the difficulties you’ve faced. I completely understand how frustrating it must have been to deal with the issue, especially given the impact it had on your website, work hours, and revenue.

        From what you’ve described, it seems the issue was tied to the Pro plugin, and deactivating it resolved the problem. While we’re glad the immediate issue is resolved, I want to assure you that we take situations like this very seriously. Our team is constantly working to improve the plugin and address any bugs or conflicts that may arise.

        Regarding the Pro version, I completely understand your hesitation to renew your subscription after this experience. However, we’d like to mention that the latest version of the plugin includes several fixes and improvements that could prevent similar issues in the future. If you ever reconsider, we’d be happy to assist you in getting everything running smoothly again.

        In the meantime, if there’s anything else I can do to help or if you’d like to share more details about the issue, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we’re committed to ensuring our plugins work seamlessly for all users.

        Thank you for your honesty, and I apologize again for the inconvenience this caused.

        Best regards,

        The Molongui Support Team

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