Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Wordpress BackupBuddy adding ?doing_wp_cron= in URLS
-
Hi
Has anyone found WordPress Backup Buddy causing a problem with SEO. I understand why it does it, but wondered if anyone experienced issues with this?
Only sometimes it adds /?doing_wp_cron=****** on to the end of a URL
Thanks
Tom
-
Most welcome Tom. Happy to assist.
P.
-
Great answer Paul - Thanks for taking the time.
-
This is the same kind of issue you encounter from any system that uses URL parameters to add additional info to a URL, Tom. (For example, even Google Analytics uses additional URL parameters to track incoming campaigns, and those can be indexed as additional URLs.
These extra URLs can cause duplicate content issues, and the first line of defence is to ensure that each of your pages includes a rel=canonical meta tag in its header. As long as the page refers to itself in the rel=canonical, any new URL that just adds parameters will include the canonical tag pointing back to the non-parameter version. (This is a best practice in WordPress anyway, and can be enabled using many of the WordPress SEO plugins.)
As an additional step, you can use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to manually tell those two search engines to ignore the extra parameters.
Hope that helps?
Paul
P.S. The best solution for this issue is avoid having BackupBuddy need to add those parameters in the first place. They're created by BackupBuddy having to use the alternate cron process, which in turn is only necessary if your host has disabled Loopbacks. If loopbacks are in fact enabled, you can turn off the alternate cron in your wp-config file and the extra URL parameters will no longer be generated.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
301 redirect adding trailing slash to url
I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
Technical SEO | | TimHolmes
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
URL - Well Formed or Malformed
Hi Mozzers, I've been mulling over whether my URLs could benefit a little SEO tweaking. I'd be grateful for your opinion. For instance, we've a product, a vintage (second hand), red Chanel bag. At the moment the URL is: www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150 Broken down... vintage-chanel-bags = this is the main product category, i.e. vintage chanel bags 2.55-bags = is a sub category of the main category above. They are vintage Chanel 2.55 bags, but I've not included 'vintage' again. 2.55 bags are a type of Chanel bag. red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag = this is the product, the bag **1362483150 **= this is a unique id, to prevent the possibility of duplicate URLs As you no doubt can see we target, in particular, the phrase **vintage. **The actual bag / product title is: Vintage Chanel Red 2.55 classic double flap bag 10” / 25cm With this in mind, would I be better off trying to match the product name with the end of the URL as closely as possible? So a close match below would involve not repeating 'chanel' again: www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag or an exact match below would involve repeating 'chanel': www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag This may open up more flexibility to experiment with product terms like second hand, preowned etc. Maybe this is a bad idea as I'm removing the phrase 'vintage' from the main category. But this logical extension of this looks like keyword stuffing !! www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/vintage-2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag Maybe this is over analyzing, but I doubt it? Thanks for looking. Kevin
Technical SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0 -
Products with discrete URLs for each color
here is the issue. i have an ecommerce site that on a category page, shows each individual color for each product sold. and there is a distinct URL for each color. each product page shares the same content, with the only potentially differentiating factor being customer reviews (not nearly enough of these to differentiate anything). so we have URLs like: www.domain.com/product-green www.domain.com/product-yellow www.domain.com/product-red and so on. i am looking for a way to consolidate these URL while still showing all colors on the category page. the first solution i am considering is using the hash tag. so we would create www.domain.com/product#green, www.domain.com/product#yellow, www.domain.com/product#red. if possible, i would set the canonical tag as www.domain.com/product. the second solution would be to use the canonical tag and keep the URLs as is. the issue i see here is that we would need to create www.domain.com/product and show that page somewhere. www.domain.com/product would the URL that the above color URLs would canonicalize to. what would be the preferred solution? or is there something else?
Technical SEO | | rakesh_patel0 -
How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?
We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | Donaab0 -
Which is the best wordpress sitemap plugin
Does anyone have a recommendation for the best xml sitemap plugin for wordpress sites or do you steer clear of plugins and use a sitemap generator then load it up to the root manually?
Technical SEO | | simoncmason0