Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
When disabling the date archives, this page will lead to 404 and it is likely that you have configured Rank Math to redirect 404s to the homepage. Could you please confirm that?
When you just remove a page on your website, the search engine might take time before all of these pages are removed from being indexed on the SERP so you may need that redirections until Google removes all the date archives from the SERP.
Looking forward to helping you with this one.
Hi Jeremy,
It seems the Fallback Behavior is indeed set to redirect to homepage, something I was unaware of. Is this the default setting? Can’t remember to have ever touched this.
I have now reverted it back to 404.
The thing with month/date archives is that those are dynamic pages so we don’t actually remove anything (maybe the plugin does so virtually). Anyway, the archives have been disabled long time ago, do you know why Screamingfrog still finds date archives?
Hello,
Sorry for the confusion in the previous reply, when the Date Archives are disabled from Rank Math, they do not return a 404 page but are redirected to the homepage with a 301 redirection.
Here’s a guide regarding it:
https://rankmath.com/kb/titles-and-meta/#:~:text=When%20you%20disable%20Date%20Archives%2C%20they%20don%E2%80%99t%20disappear%20from%20your%20website.%20They%20are%20redirected%20to%20your%20homepage%20instead.
Since the Date Archives are not created by Rank Math and it is a default feature of WordPress, we can only redirect it when it is disabled.
However, keeping the Date Archives disabled is a recommended setting as they usually have thin contents. Also, this would not negatively affect the SEO of your website as it will help in saving your crawl bugdet.
Hope this helps.
Thank you.
Hello,
Glad that helped.
Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.
We are here to help.
Thank you.
