wordpress SEO – date / author archives

[laura]

I have the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin on my website, and through it I de-activated the Date Archives and Author Archives (which you can do in SEO> titles & metas > other.

However, when I get an error 404 page (example:  error 404 page  ) on my site, the Author and Date archives appear.  Is this normal?

[cdils]

Hi Laura,

That is the default behavior for the archive template to show those elements. You can work around it by creating a custom archive template or try out the Genesis 404 Page plugin.

Cheers,

Carrie

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[laura]

I thought that by selecting the "disable date archives" and "disable author archives" option on the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, I was exactly doing what you recommend (i.e. create a custom archive that did not include author or date archives)?  Or am I understanding those options incorrectly?

[cdils]

The plugin disables those specific archive pages (author.php and date.php), it does not remove references to those pages from archive.php (That can get confusing! You might find the template hierarchy helpful - http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy)

In short, the SEO plugin took access to those pages out of the mix, but since they're part of the Genesis archive template (archive.php), you'll need to customize via one of the options above.

---

Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[laura]

@cdils - I think I kind of understand it.... My key driver for setting those settings in the SEO plugin was to avoid duplicate content.  Does it achieve that?

[cdils]

Yep, you got it! If you're on a single-author blog, then the author archives just look like a duplicate of your regular archive. Disabling that eliminates any perceived duplicate content by a search engine.

I'm not an SEO expert, but I don't think there's any harm in leaving your regular archive page (what you see on a 404) as is. But of course, it's always nice to customize. 🙂

---

Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[laura]

@cdils - since I am struggling to customize a simple thing like the word "comments" in post info, I think it is wise to leave archive page customisations to a later date 😉

I thought that to customize something I needed to add code at the end of the function.php file, but when I added the code snippet provided by studiopress everything went blank - so I obviously do not have a natural knack for coding 😀

[cdils]

Oh yes, functions.php can be a dangerous place to play! I recommend having FTP up and running so you can dash in and manually remove anything from the file in case of emergency.

StudioPress themes are great enough without customizations, but if you ever get the itch (and you just might!), it's a lot of fun to get in there and tinker.

Until then,

Carrie

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Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[Author]

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