[Resolved] why are these pages being created?

[Henry Bowman]

We have been trying to figure out why some pages are being flagged as 404’s in search console, Parameters like: https://usanunchaku.com/product-category/real-nunchaku/12-inch-standard/page/6/?orderby=popularity

We see Google is crawling these parameters and outputting a 404 for them. This is odd. Google should not be crawling those kinds of URLs to begin with. We were advised speaking to our GeneratePress theme developer and ask them why those pages are being created as it seems the theme is generated these “filters”

[Tom]

Hi there,

GeneratePress itself doesn’t add filters. WooCommerce includes the filter ability by default.

It looks like the issue here is that category doesn’t have 6 pages. If you change it to /page/5 it works fine.

[Henry Bowman]

So the real question is why is the crawl index listing a page 6 when there are only 5 ?

[Tom]

Definitely a good question. Are you using a sitemap? If so, is it up to date?

[Henry Bowman]

We use Yoast Pro to generate the site map. We assumed it was constant, meaning that it would not generate a page 6 of a product category if for some reason that day there were only 5 pages. The other issue may simply be that by the time google indexes the map, the map has changed.

[Tom]

It’s possible. I think you can rebuild your sitemap manually.

However, you might find that the issue just goes away by itself.

[Author]

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