Question – Disabling and Deleting Author & Date Archives

  • Resolved nevrsmer

    (@nevrsmer)


    4 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    Please know I am not a developer, nor am I a WordPress wizard or expert. I’m just a normal person who works on his own website. So, my apologies for my ignorance.

    I have questions regarding Author and Date Archives. Recently, I scanned our site for duplicate content, and the results showed our site had about 80%, which we found odd given that all our posts and pages are unique. For some reason, each page or post was duplicated and given a different permalink.

    After some research, I discovered these were automatically generated archives based on the author and date. I then followed the directions in your post to disable Author and Date Archives and have them redirected to the home page (https://yoast.com/help/disable-enable-author-archives/).

    What I want to know is:

    1. Does disabling Author and Date Archives prevent future Author and Date Archives from being created?

    2. Does this delete all Author and Date Archives that have been created?

    3. What can I do to prevent Author, Date and any other type of archive page from being created?

    4. If disabling Author and Date Archives in Yoast does not delete our current Author and Date archives, what can I do to delete them?

    Thank you for your time and have a good day.

    Cheers!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi @nevrsmer,

    Thank you for reaching out.

    You have a few concerns, let’s tackle them one by one.

    1) Yes.

    2) Yes, existing author archives or date archives should no longer work after disabling them in the plugin settings.

    3) It’s WordPress that creates those by default. The same goes for the category/tag archives as well. Depending on what you want to be indexed in the search results, you can configure those in the plugin settings under SEO → Search Appearance → Taxonomies/Archives tabs.

    4) See 2.

    Thread Starter nevrsmer

    (@nevrsmer)

    Hello Jer?en,

    Thanks for the reply and information.

    I have some follow up questions if you have a moment.

    Question 1

    In Search Appearance –> Taxonomies, I have Tags (post_tag), Formats (post_format), Product Categories (product_cat), Product Tags (product_tag), and Shipping Classes (product_shipping_class) all set to No.

    In Search Appearance –> Archives, I have Author archives settings, Date archives settings set to Disabled.

    Just to make sure, by having all of the above items set to either No or Disabled, does this ensure that all the archives these items produce will not be indexed?

    I did check the XML sitemap, and none of the are present. I also re-ran a site scan for duplicate content, and the major issue with duplicate content has been resolved by implementing the above settings.

    Question 2

    Is there any way to permanently delete all the archives associated with the above instances that have been created automatically by WordPress? Is there any way to prevent WordPress from creating these archives.

    From what I understand, setting the above options to No or Disabled does not delete them and it does not prevent them from being created automatically by WordPress. It looks like Yoast redirects quires to these items to the home page. Is that correct?

    Does having all of these archives in the data base and all these redirects affect server and application performance?

    Again, thank you for your time and have a good day.

    Cheers!

    Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    Hello @nevrsmer

    Thank you for getting back to us.

    Question #1

    If you set the option to ‘no’ for the option of ‘show in search results?’ for a particular content type or taxonomy, then it will have a ‘noindex’ tag added to it and it will be removed from the sitemap index.

    Question #2

    We recommend you try and check on further WordPress documentation as these archives are created by default and we’re not sure on how to recommend on how to ‘delete’ them. In particular, it’s the author archives that will redirect to the homepage. No, it shouldn’t affect your website in any major way in terms of performance.

    Plugin Support Jerlyn

    (@jerparx)

    Hi @nevrsmer ,

    We’re closing this thread because we haven’t heard back from you in a while. Should you have further questions, please open a new thread.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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