Support » Fixing WordPress » Urls /?p= and /tag/

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  • Xenu should provide a report of the pages with links to the numbered URLs. If not, try ScreamingFrog which is another crawler. The free version has a 500 URL limit though.

    As for tags, they can be used effectively for both users and search engines. But more often than not I see them as cluttering things unnecessarily. Some well thought out categories seem to work for a lot of sites. If you want to use tags but are worried about the duplication, you can use one of the SEO plugins to set tag pages to noindex so that they’re visible to users, but ignored by search engines.

    @ross

    I confirm you that in the final background of urls, a tool like Xenu will find duplicates like:

    mysite.com/?p=2064 = mysite.com/cool-review-of-restaurants

    same goes for tag, xenu is not able to really scan tags/cats so on nor read a sitemap

    But it’s not the case for Google and crawlers. It’s just that Xenu will ultimately crawl a site without even reading the server rules (which Google and likes DON’T do – they understand query, search pages and most of what WP uses to create searchable groups of items).

    So rest assured, your site is not SEO-buggy at least for that matter:)

    Now, I didn’t say Xenu is a bad tool, just inaccurate for a WP site. Then, I suggest you run a check of your site with some nice tool like:

    tools.pingdom.com/fpt

    It will show you real duplicates and performance issues.

    Regards,

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Volunteer Moderator

    1. How they appeared?

    Those are WordPress’s default links, they will always be there. ?p=6131 stands for Post ID 6131.

    2. Is there SEO impact by having them?

    Not at all, when visited, WordPress issues a 301 Moved Permanently status and redirects to your custom permalink structure. This tells search bots that both are in fact the same page and that you prefer your custom permalink structure.

    3. How can I delete them OR exclude them, so Search engines wouldn’t see them, because it is duplication.

    You can’t, they’re a part of WordPress. WordPress takes care of their exclusion from search engines for you by the way it handles the redirect as described above.

    I’ll add to James post that it’s also up to you to manage moves and 301 redirects, to new or subdomain urls.

    And like James says, some issues are just automatically handled by WP by automatic .htaccess and stuff, after it’s still up to you to check that on a site-level with Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).

    I’ll also add if SEO if crucial for you or your client, SEO plugins are not enough, you have to manage this yourself, knowledge with Apache, Nginx or so is highly advised.

    Regards,

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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