Truncated URLs and weird redirects in Google Webmasters

Plugin support says they do not support redirects, but that does not mean a problem in their plugin is causing truncated URLs to be indexed by search bots. I’m not saying there is a problem, only that their statement does not refute the root cause of the problem: the truncated URLs. The redirects are a side effect.

I don’t know the cause of truncated URLs, but I can tell you all WP permalinks on your site should appear with a trailing slash or there will be at least one redirect. If you have a valid SSL certificate, ensure all URLs use https:// protocol or there will be another redirect. In particular ensure your site and home URLs in settings use https://

Make every effort to resolve the truncated URLs. Be sure they do not appear in your sitemap, if you have one. If the truncated links are referred from a third party source, attempt to get that site’s owners to correct your links. If that cannot be done, you can disavow links through https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Be sure to read the “more information” link, the format required is very specific.

I’m no SEO expert, but I don’t think the redirects are harmful for normal indexing, but they affect page performance. Adverse page performance can impact mobile indexing. You need to resolve this, I’m sorry I can’t help you further with that aspect.

Thank you for your reply. All links in the sitemap are normal, links from other sites are also ok.

There is an idea that the shortened URLs may be due to a plugin that has not been updated for a long time – RusToLat. This plugin creates url in English if the article title was in Russian.

To test this idea, I thought to install a newer and updated Cyr to lat plugin, but I am afraid that it will change the URL in already published articles and pictures.

But it is still not clear where these shortened URLs come from in the Google webmaster? After all, in theory, if a redirect is triggered, then over time, such pages with shortened URLs should disappear from the webmaster’s Google panel. But gradually new shortened urls appear.

I also noticed that on all WordPress web sites, if you manually delete some of the last words in the url in the browser bar (except if there is .html at the end of the url, then you need to leave it), then there is a redirect to the article that has the whole url.

It’s a difficult situation because such links don’t seem to appear anywhere, but Google is not revealing the referrer page. It’s difficult to solve a problem if you cannot even find the symptom. If new truncated URLs continue to show up, disavowing them is not a sustainable solution.

From my experience in coding, I don’t think the plugin would alter existing Latin URLs, only any Cyrillic ones it finds. But I’m not familiar with the plugin, so I could easily be wrong. If changing old URLs happens or not would be a question to ask the plugin devs. Even if it did and it did so with a 301 redirect, there may not be any adverse effect.

You are right, WP will redirect truncated URLs to what it thinks is the closest match of what exists in the DB. That’s a “feature” when there is still most of a slug and there is only one reasonable match. It becomes a problem when an URL is truncated to a single letter which could match any number of slugs. The one WP picks will likely be the wrong page.