Don’t want this page/url to exist AND don’t want it to be indexed

It’s not a “page” in the WordPress sense at least. It’s a category listing. Look under ‘Posts’ and in ‘Categories’ you’ll find a category called ‘Uncategorized’. That’s where it’s coming from.

How to remove it depends on how you want to have things work. If you want to have categories, then it’s a good idea to either delete this one and use another category as the default, or rename that one to a catgory that will be useful for you.

Hi, thanks for confirming it’s not a page! Yep I saw under posts –> categories, that “uncategorized” is a default category…I dont want any categories, and I see that I can’t delete “uncategorized” category, only rename it. It actually doesn’t bother me that wordpress assigns it a category.

What bothers me is I dont want this link to be findable, I want this “category listing” to be indexed by google, and I don’t want anyone who has a crafty mind to just go to my website and type in that URL since it’s kind of default for wordpress sites I suppose so it’s easy to figure out. I’m asking how to do that.

Should I try installing some SEO plugin and change some robot.txt file for that URL and tell google not to index that page, and also change the category name to somehing weird so no one would know to type in the name of the category in the URL on their own (people could think to type in “uncategorized” but probably would not think to type in “xpohepihv”)

or is it better to change a robot.txt file on my own without an SEP plugin adding bloat?

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

If you want to be sure that it’s not indexed and is not able to be found then I’d recommend using a redirect to send anyone that tries to go to that URL to a different URL.

Redirects can be done using your sites .htaccess file or there’s a lot of plugins that can do that job for you as well.

That’s a great idea, why didn’t I think of that? The only issue is, even if it is redirected, wouldn’t still be able to index it (you wrote no above basically, but I dont understand how that works.) if it only redirects and google can still index it, then first few blog posts would still show in the – is it called snippet? description? in google.

So what I did is installed rankmath and marked that category page as noindex. I also renamed the category to something that is not easily guessable. Time will tell if it works or not. But a page redirect is another great idea, especially if it makes google not index it – but even if google indexes it, it’s still a good backup idea. Thank you!

I’ll leave this open in case you want to reply. If not, I undertand!

A proper redirect will be a 301 status, and that tells Google (and other search engines) that the page doesn’t exist and any links, indexing, etc should be done on the URL that it’s being redirected to. It is by far a better option if you don’t want any chance of it being indexed.

Thanks so much! Last question (i think) – why is doing a redirect a far better way than using an seo plugin like rankmath? Not challenging you – I know pretty much nothing – just trying to learn.

I’ve never sued Rank Math so I don’t know what it does or doesn’t do.

But as a general rule, most SEO plugins will add meta tags to pages that direct SE’s not to index that page. It’s up to the SE if they do that or not. A redirect basically forces them to use the new URL and de-index the redirected one.

That’s so cool. You’ve taught me something important and answered my original question which was driving me crazy. THANK YOU!!!!!!