wper000

The domain only. The database contains only my entries, it’s on a clean, new server.

The URL’s are just old ones from the last owners that are still sitting in Google’s index, which is unfortunately causing duplicate content issues for me

I worked out that these URL’s still exist in Google’s index from whomever owned the domain previously.

This is causing Google to look at the root of my site through any of those URL’s since those pages no longer exist.

Is there any way to forward those old URL’s that begin with a /? to a 404 page?

I tried the above but there was so much damage done in the search engines because of it, i disabled the entire installation and flipped it to a static site.

I’m just trying to avoid the same issue on any other websites that I have running.

Thanks for the help regardless!

Is there a way to make WordPress stop displaying any URL that begins with https://www.example.com/?xxxxxx, i.e. perhaps forward any URL’s begining with a ? to a 404 page or similar?

– I only had 1 plugin activated that I have running on around 30 other websites I own and never had issue with. I deactivated it for now to see.

– I switched to the default theme already, we’ll see how that works.