How do I rid mysterious archive paths for my site?

  • I have a site that’s a few years old. Google webmaster tools is reporting I have a broken link from https://www.mysite.com/2008/12. I had no idea that path even existed on my domain, but sure enough it comes up, as do all the other years since I began the site, e.g. mysite.com/2009. They always display my homepage, and I’m worried that Google will see that as a duplicate content page!

    So, the question is, how do I ‘disable’ whatever is creating this path or change settings, configure files that would make it not exist? When I FTP into my server, there are not such directories to delete, nor are they listed in my auto-generated XML sitemap. Thanks for any insight/help on this one!

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  • Your site’s content is stored in the database. All “url paths” are virtual with archive pages being generated on demand. You cannot delete an entire month’s worth of posts from 2008 with deleting each one of the posts that was published within that month.

    It might help if you posted a real site url so we could see if you actually have any problem/issue at all.

    Thread Starter TJ

    (@tysonjm)

    Thanks… I think I understand these are virtual pages, but there must be something causing them to be “reachable” for this site – I’m perplexed because my other wordpress sites don’t do this. I also wonder why they would get indexed if nothing links to them? For reference, the site URL is https://www.homerepairgeek.com. You’ll see the same site comes up when you add /2008, /2009, etc. after the url.

    You may have linked to these archives a while ago and they are still in Google’s cache. It can take up to 90 days for Google to refresh its cache. In the meantime, I’d suggest creating a Google XMl sitemap for your site and submitting it to Google via a Google Webmaster account.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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