WPML creating unnecessary pages

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Tagged: Action needed - UI/UX, Not WPML issue

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Last updated by Laura 1 month, 3 weeks ago.

Author	Posts
April 16, 2025 at 8:04 pm #16941120
tatianaW-2	Hintergrund des Themas: I am working on the SEO of my website and noticed several issues related to WPML. The plugin is generating unnecessary URLs and pages that are not supposed to be created. Here are the URLs: hidden link, hidden link, hidden link, and hidden link. I expected these pages not to be created at all. Die Symptome: WPML is creating URLs and pages in German that are not supposed to be translated, despite the language settings being configured differently. This includes unnecessary URLs and translated versions of course and job pages. Fragen: How can I stop these URLs from being created and how can I delete them? How can I stop WPML from creating German versions of my course pages? How can I stop WPML from creating translated versions of my job pages and how can I delete them?
April 18, 2025 at 9:00 am #16946750
Laura WPML Supporter since 05/2018 Languages: English (English ) Italian (Italiano ) Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)	Hi, Thanks for contacting us. There are 2 different issues here, but none is WPML's responsibility. About URLs ending with ?lang=de, WPML is not creating such pages; if you check the database, you won't find any posts with these URLs. If you check, for example, hidden link, the content is in English and the page shows the English flag. Even if you used the URL parameter instead of directories, the correct URL would be hidden link WordPress sometimes autoguesses the URLs, adding the parameters. There's nothing WPML can do about it. However, such URLs are not available anywhere in the front end, so it's unlikely someone can hit them by chance. If you want to be extra sure, you can add a nofollow in your Google console or SEO plugin. As for your course pages, I can see you set them as Do not translate. When you use such a setting, pages are available in all languages. Therefore, what you are experiencing is the expected behavior. Even in this case, though, WPML is not creating any page in the database. If you don't want to see this kind of URLs, you should change the post type "courses" to "show only if translated" in WPML > Settings > Post Type Translation.

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