My website was penalized because of yoast
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My website was penalized because of yoast settings.
In search appearances > Archives
I have disabled author archives.
This means that every author pages were redirected to the homepage of my website.
Since I had a link to the author page on every page, I had a 301 redirection from the author page to my homepage on every single post.
Google saw this as a way to manipulate the ranking of my homepage. I lost half of my Google organic traffic in one week.
I understood the problem after one week but it was too late. It took 3 weeks to recover.
The author page should have returned a 404 error page. It would have been an ugly solution but it would not have hurt my organic traffic as much as the redirection.
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Hi @bloup,
Thanks for your comment.
We are sorry to hear that your website has been penalized by Google. Yoast SEO allows you to either 1) disable author pages and redirect them to your homepage or 2) keep them active and output a noindex tag on them.
We do advise on the settings page that links to archives might be still output by your theme and you would need to remove them separately. See screenshot for reference. For the second option, you’ll need to toggle the
Show author archives in search results?button to No under SEO > Search Appearance > Archives.That said, we’ve opened a feature request with our developers to make this clearer.
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