Broken posts pages causing 404's

I forgot to mention that I am using a custom child theme of Thematic.

Have you have tried flushing permalinks by changing the permalink structure in the wp-admin and changing them pack to your original preference?

Other than that I can see that you have used relative urls in the insterted table on the broken page. It would be better to use absolute urls.

WordPress provides plenty of help in that regard get_stylesheet_directory_uri and get_template_directory_uri for example.

It could be that your use of relative urls is leading Google’s spiders down a broken path somewhere on your site.

Gene,

I’m really grateful for your help on this.

I tried changing permalinks to a new type by the phantom pages remain operational. Changing back to the current permalink type didn’t help either.

You were right about the relative urls making the welcome page broken when it appears as page/1 etc.. So I have fixed that. It now looks right.

This may well fix the google crawling errors.

I still don’t know why these pages exist… is it normal? They are not linked to from anywhere, however, so I suppose they won’t actually do any damage. I’m just a perfectionist and would rather they didn’t exist at all.

I tested it and am getting the same results. I think that this is a normal behavior of WordPress.

You have created a page and assigned it as the front page in the reading settings. WordPress is treating paginated queries to the site’s root url as if they were the paginated results of that WP Page. In response to an invalid paginated request WordPress is sending you to the page itself instead of to a 404 error page.

Hope that helps demystify the odd user experience. It’s hard to say why the page views were showing up on your analytics. Oh well.

On a side note, your child theme could use some love. it looks like your loading all the super fish dropdown nav scripts for no reason. What child theme is your theme a derivative of? Sophia? Anyway if you’d like help removing those scripts serch the community forums over here Thematictheme.com i’m pretty sure that the removal of those scripts addressed over there before.

Hello again Gene,

I’m really grateful that you have taken the time to look into this.

If you are getting the same results, then I am satisfied.

I’m also a bit blown away that you looked into my child theme. It’s actually a theme I made myself, based on thematic. I was aware that it was loading the superfish scripts, but didn’t think that would make much difference. However you’re right, it would be neater not to load them if I’m not using them. I’ll deal with that soon.

Thank you again!
Kit