?paged=x Error in Google Search Console

  • Hi All,

    We’re getting a few errors (404 broken links) in Google Search Console whose URLs end in “/?paged=x”. For example, “blogpost/?paged=1”, “blogpost/?paged=3”, etc.

    In a few cases, simply removing everything past the forward slash in the URL goes to a real page (even though we’ve redirected a couple of them). In other cases, that wasn’t enough, and the page was still broken.

    My question is, how can I prevent these errors? Is there some setting in WP or Yoast that adds the “?paged=x” to the end or the URL, thereby causing the URL to be broken?

    We’re on WP 4.9.8 and we have Yoast plugin version 7.9.1 installed.

    Thanks in advance.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    There should never be ?paged=# query strings in links when you have pretty permalinks enabled, as your site does. There is no telling what some themes and plugins do, but Yoast or core WP would not do this with pretty permalinks. You don’t want to suppress paged query strings though, it could break legitimate pagination.

    The real question is where are these erroneous links coming from? If from your own site, the links should be fixed to output proper pagination links, and only when there is valid paginated content. If outside your control, you can disavow links in Search Console.

    It may be there are no longer any such links on the referring pages. In this case, Google probably cached the links long ago when they were still valid, and is only now getting around to crawling the links. If so, all you can do is tell Google the error has been resolved. There still may be more erroneous links cached, causing more 404 errors. As long as there are no longer referring links in existence, Google will eventually stop trying to crawl them, but it may take a while.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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