category and tag pagination

Hi, @bukers,

Did you recently use link rewrite plugins or update any plugins related to WooCommerce. Either of those changes might very well be the cause for invalidated URLs.

Follow the links and see if they’re returning 404 or an actual page. Also, check if those URLs are present in the sitemap.
There might be an aggregating “spam” website generating invalid backlinks for you, too.

Note that TSF doesn’t output the query arguments for canonical URLs, so whatever you’ve listed there shouldn’t be present in Google Search.

I can only give guidelines and assumptions without a website URL. Nevertheless, I hope this steers you in the right direction!

Hey Sybre,

Thank you for your reply. No those pages are not in the sitemap, nor do they link to anything but 404. The xml sitemap generated by your software actually looks clean and well organised.

You said aggregating spam sites generating invalid backlinks to us. How can I avoid that?

Hi @bukers,

You can find the origin URLs in Google’s Search Console.
Simply go to “Crawl -> Crawl Errors” and click on the erroneous URL.

You should see something like this under the “Linked from” tab:

Google filters these spam sites out most of the time. I normally mark them as fixed, and that’s it.
If they do come back as errors, then you might wish to disavow the links. I’ve luckily never had to do so; nevertheless, all information you need is linked to on that page ??

If it’s “Linked from” your own website, then you might wish to inspect the pages for broken links.