WordPress Redirecting Non Category Pages /page/nnn to their Canonical URLs

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I seemingly to have a strange issue I have found in almost every other WordPress site.

Suppose, you have set your Blog home to a static WP page /myhome. And you have a separate page for blog /blog.

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Now, this works fine and should be: 

/blog
/blog/page/2
/blog/page/3
/blog/page/4

But, for all other pages, e.g. /about-us, these links also work: 

/about-us/page/2
/about-us/page/3
/about-us/page/4

And show the content of the /about-us page.

My problem is that /about-us/page/2 should ideally redirect to /about-us (it’s canonical URL) since there are no paginations in any other page except the /blog.

What am I missing there ? This seems to happen on almost all sites I have checked and is really frustrating from SEO point of view.

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2 comments

  1. This is by design and intentional. WordPress rewrites have become increasingly complex over the years, and many plugins utilise the page endpoint for a page (usually with a template and custom query) – redirecting introduces a potential world of pain.

    Long story short, it doesn’t matter anyway. WordPress adds <link rel="canonical /> for pages, so no need to worry over duplicate content.

    Update: For localised situations where you want to disregard the potential risks, this will canonicalize all page URLs – note that it does not check if a page is actually paginated (i.e. with the <!--nextpage--> quicktag) and will break this feature if you use it.

    function wpse_199180_canonical_pages( $wp ) {
    if ( ! is_admin() && is_page() && isset( $wp->query_vars['paged'] ) ) {
        wp_redirect( get_permalink( get_queried_object() ), 301 );
        exit;
    }
}

add_action( 'wp', 'wpse_199180_canonical_pages' );

  2. This is not the normal Worpdress behaviour, if pagination isn’t enabled for a page it shouldn’t accept the page argument. Just tested on a WordPress page, /mypage/page/2 gives a 404.

    It probably have something to do with your theme and how the post are queried. For example. Look for posts_per_page and numberposts in your theme files, and locate the query that is related to your page. Change then the value to -1 in order to disable the pagination.

    One other solution would be redirect all paginated URLs (except for blog) – this goes in functions.php:

    function redirect_pagination() {
    if(!preg_match('/blog/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) {
        if(preg_match('/page/[0-9]+/?$/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) {
            $new_url = preg_replace('/(page/[0-9]+/?)$/', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
            wp_redirect($new_url, 301);
            exit;
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'init', 'redirect_pagination', 1 );

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