Check out this image:

This is twenty twenty theme, a default theme. I started facing the problem with a non-default theme, so I switched over to this other theme just for testing, same thing. What's happening is that when I hover the mouse on the category name "Empreendedorismo Digital", my slug url, or should I say permanlink, displays a "category" word right before the category name in the url, and this shouldn't happen. Because of this, google is treating my website categories page as duplicated content. The actual url should be / and not /

I've already changed my htaccess file to the default htaccess that comes with wordpress, cleared all the cache, restarted the entire VPS and nothing happened. As you can see, I also moved to a default theme: same thing. I've checked permanlinks page in wordpress settings page and it's normal, my custom structure is /%category%/%postname%/, meaning that it should display /categoryname/postname, also there's nothing in the optional fields. Why is wordpress adding the category word before my actual category name in my url?

Check out this image:

This is twenty twenty theme, a default theme. I started facing the problem with a non-default theme, so I switched over to this other theme just for testing, same thing. What's happening is that when I hover the mouse on the category name "Empreendedorismo Digital", my slug url, or should I say permanlink, displays a "category" word right before the category name in the url, and this shouldn't happen. Because of this, google is treating my website categories page as duplicated content. The actual url should be https://lucrebem.br/emp-digital/ and not https://lucrebem.br/category/emp-digital/

I've already changed my htaccess file to the default htaccess that comes with wordpress, cleared all the cache, restarted the entire VPS and nothing happened. As you can see, I also moved to a default theme: same thing. I've checked permanlinks page in wordpress settings page and it's normal, my custom structure is /%category%/%postname%/, meaning that it should display /categoryname/postname, also there's nothing in the optional fields. Why is wordpress adding the category word before my actual category name in my url?

• url-rewriting
• urls
• htaccess
• slug
• site-url

• This is the normal behaviour. Always has been, and it has nothing to do with the theme. It's necessary because otherwise WordPress wouldn't know whether a request for /emp-digital/ is for a post with that name, or a category. Note that the custom permalink structure /%category%/%postname%/ is for posts. The posts will have the path /categoryname/postname but if you view the category itself it has its own path with /category/ at the beginning. – Jacob Peattie Commented Sep 22, 2021 at 6:30
• Yes, I noticed that's not theme related, that's why I changed the theme, to check, but still, what about duplicated content, should I worry? – Brave Warrior Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 6:49
• What's duplicated? Anyway, that's an SEO question, so would be better asked elsewhere. That being said, categorising content is extremely common and perfectly normal. There's no reason to expect you'd be penalised for it. – Jacob Peattie Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 7:43

1 Answer 1

This should be a comment but I have not enough reputation yet, sorry for that... As Jacob said in his comment this is the normal behaviour. However this issue has already been discussed many times. Check this Q/A as an example: https://stackoverflow/questions/17798815/remove-category-tag-base-from-wordpress-url-without-a-plugin