WPML is creating pages, that should not exist

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Supporter timezone: Asia/Kathmandu (GMT+05:45)

This topic contains 3 replies, has 1 voice.

Last updated by Shekhar Bhandari 3 weeks, 5 days ago.

Assisted by: Shekhar Bhandari.

Author	Posts
April 15, 2025 at 8:36 am #16932404
akakiT	Background of the issue: I am trying to figure out why WPML is overindexing pages. I have set the option 'Translatable - only show translated items', but it still shows other ones. This issue can be seen on the page: hidden link. I expected this page to not exist: hidden link and this page to exist: hidden link. Symptoms: WPML is creating pages that should not exist, and it has indexed over 100,000 pages. The setting 'Translatable - only show translated items' does not seem to work as expected. Questions: How can I disable the overindexing of pages? Why does the 'Translatable - only show translated items' setting not work as expected?
April 16, 2025 at 7:28 am #16937068
Marcel WPML Supporter since 02/2019 Languages: English (English ) German (Deutsch ) Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)	Hi, before your ticket is assigned to one of my colleagues, please allow me to walk you through some initial debugging steps. This will help speed up the support process. I'm not entirely sure what you mean. This page does exist, which is the expected behavior if the secondary language is enabled. So it can be indexed — but what’s happening is that a 301 redirect is currently in place: > -------------------------------------------- > 301 Moved Permanently > -------------------------------------------- Status: 301 Moved Permanently Code: 301 Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:13:43 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0, no-store, private x-redirect-by: WordPress Location: <em><u>hidden link</u></em> vary: Accept-Encoding cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC speculation-rules: "/cdn-cgi/speculation" Server: cloudflare CF-RAY: 9311e1b1d89e3a6e-FRA alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 >>> hidden link > -------------------------------------------- > 200 OK > -------------------------------------------- [/php] Best Regards, Marcel
April 16, 2025 at 11:18 am #16938186
akakiT	Hi Marcel, thanks for your response. These pages do exist, but we don’t want them to be live on the website. Previously, we changed the WPML translation setting from “only show translated items” to “use translation if available or fallback to default language”. As a result, many fallback pages were generated (if a page existed in English but wasn’t translated into Turkish, WPML automatically created a new URL (added /tr/) displaying the same English content (hidden link) We have since reverted the setting back to “only show trasnlate items,” but those fallback pages did not disappear from the site, and they are now being indexed by Google. Given that our website has over 300,000 pages, we don't have time to manually delete them one by one. What can we do to remove these pages?
April 17, 2025 at 4:26 am #16941697
Shekhar Bhandari WPML Supporter since 03/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: Asia/Kathmandu (GMT+05:45)	Hello there, I'll be happy to assist you further with this issue. As you mentioned, enabling the fallback method may have led to the URLs being indexed by Google. To address this, the most effective solution is to submit an updated sitemap and allow some time for Google to re-crawl and re-index your site accordingly. Please let me know if this helps or if you have any further questions. Thank you

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