Jackson

Here’s what Google is telling me…

“Would agree that setting some sort of redirect on the URL would be good. Its clearly some sort of ‘mistake’ page. Looks like the ‘cat=’ forwards it to category listing page handler. but -1 is not a real category. So its then probably just trying to list all posts.  That particular post is the most recent post, but because it not really a ‘category’ page, it rendered by normal page handler, whch ends up putting in canonical etc.  Although perhaps even better would be to ‘fix’ wordpress, so this URL doesnt return content. A the most crude…  <?php if (isset($_GET[‘cat’]) && $_GET[‘cat’] == -1) {      header(‘HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found’);      exit;} 

Or even better would be just the fix the code, as it clearly knows when a category doesnt existhttps://www.aframeforward.com/?cat=1232423523it should do exactly the same for -1In fact it seems does the same for anything <1, eg /?cat=-1232423523 gives the same duplicate.

Possibly do something better than return no content, so that if users end up there it ok. But important is not to return the content of an actual page.  This is better than trying to ‘noindex’ the page, as it risks affecting real pages.”

and…

“Just for reference, I dug a bit in wordpress source. Seems it tries to support negative cat ids, to function as exclude filter  $cat_array = preg_split(‘/[,\s]+/’, $q[‘cat’]);
                        $q[‘cat’] = ”;
                        $req_cats = array();
                        foreach ( (array) $cat_array as $cat ) {
                                $cat = intval($cat);
                                $req_cats[] = $cat;
                                $in = ($cat > 0);
                                $cat = abs($cat);
                                if ( $in ) {
                                        $q[‘category__in’][] = $cat;
                                        $q[‘category__in’] = array_merge( $q[‘category__in’], get_term_children($cat, ‘category’) );
                                } else {
                                        $q[‘category__not_in’][] = $cat;
                                        $q[‘category__not_in’] = array_merge( $q[‘category__not_in’], get_term_children($cat, ‘category’) );
                                }
                        }
 This is from wp-includes/query.php So that is what is being ‘shown’. All posts NOT in category 1! I would guess this is such little known functionality, that your theme, and perhaps even Yoast, is not ‘seeing’ it as a real category page. Hence yoast does not inject the noindex tag, and the rel=canonical is being created incorrectly.  (don’t have Yoast installed to check it source)”

What do you make of this?

Thanks!

Jackson

=D