I’m working on a content audit of a long standing wordpress based site with thousands of posts. Over the years various posts have been removed. As a result, I’m noticing many automatically generated archive pages for categories and authors, which aren’t populated with any posts.
For example, author John Smith has 5 associated archive pages; [mysite.com/author/johnsmith/page/1]) , [mysite.com/author/johnsmith/page/2]) , [mysite.com/author/johnsmith/page/3]) , etc. Maybe at one point this author had 50 posts. But over time 40 posts were deleted and now only 10 posts remain. Now, the first archive page populates with the 10 posts and displays a pagination showing 4 more pages. When you go to any of those four additional pages, they don’t have any posts.
My question is, is there anyway to clean these up so archive pages which no longer contain posts are removed?
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Something is wrong if the archive page is showing pagination and there aren’t additional articles. Pagination is generated dynamically, based on the number of articles, so it would seem the the articles still exist. The /2 URLs should return a 404 if there aren’t >10 articles.