Negative Category Pages (/?cat=-1)

There is always a numeric equivalent to any post, page, tag, or category within your website.

In your case your numeric representations for your categories are not making actual sense but are probably the result of some plugin or administrative action and the existence of those doesn’t bother me…

What bothers me is who or what is promoting those numeric categories to the Search Engines.

Also, changing pagination just put all the categoric content into one huge page instead of many. The problem is still there.

I did check your published sitemaps and they look fine… Same for your RSS feed.

Are you sure Google is actually seeing these pages and dinging you on overall ranking due to them? The question you need to answer is how is Google finding these?

Once you’ve answered that question you can then stop that via some SEO work which is beyond my interest and outside of WordPress.

In the meantime I’d set my pagination back as before… you’re not solving the problem that way. You might be overloading your visitors or their browser capabilities.

Visitors and their experience always comes before the fleeting benefits of SEO.

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One more thing you might do would be to install HTTrack on your PC and spider your site with that once then look at the log and results there to see if there’s any files or links anywhere within your site that might be triggering this action.

I considered passing your site through my HTTrack but decided not to due to the unpaginated status of your site at this time. I doubt I’d be able to see anything with the huge files that would result and I was concerned it would crash my small system here if left to run on its own overnight.

Thanks for the awesome reply @jnashhawkins, I really appreciate you taking the time. Most helpful information I’ve received yet to understand what’s going on.

Google is reading them and in some instances the negative category page is actually outranking the real post that is supposed to be returning for that given query. They will be stacked on top of each other in the results sometimes. Super weird.

They show up in Google Search Console too, and I see big swings in rankings as on some days I’ll have a specific post ranking in position 3 and the negative category page will not be showing up. But then a different day that same post will fall down to position 40 or something BUT that negative category page will also be generating results. And like I said they appear right on top of each other at times.

Yes, the problem is still there for sure. I did the 999 blog posts thing to get rid of all the different links as everyone wanted me to keep URL inspecting them in GSC to get google to figure out that they shouldn’t be indexing that page. I suspect doing that was what was creating the organic search ranking fluctuations too.

Also, with them all on just one link I was thinking there would be a potential to remove just that one URL or somehow no-index it. My site is not very big so the 999 would never happen. I think my entire blog is less than 90 posts.

Visitor experience won’t change with this setting. They’ll never find that page as there is not clickable link to it anyways.

I’ll have to look into the HTTrack thing. I’m admittedly not very technical with all this stuff but I’m sure I could figure it out.

Let me know if my response to your questions give you any other ideas.

Thanks again, I really appreciate it!

=D

Hi @jnashhawkins, just swinging back around as it looks like that HTTrack is only for PC’s unfortunately.

Wondering if you had any other thoughts on this after my previous reply to you?

Thanks so much!

=D

FYI, I’ve just run into this causing some problems on www.remarpro.com, and as such suspect that it’s a core WordPress bug which we need to squash somewhere upstream. I’ll report back if/when I make progress with diagnosing!