When editing this page in the dashboard, I've defined the URL slug as ft-lauderdale. Also, the title of the page is 'Ft. Lauderdale', and the slug in Yoast is ft-lauderdale:

However, when I view this page, the URL shows as /locations/springfield-2 :

I don't know why this is happening. There's also a 404 error, but the page exists in the dashboard? Anyone have any ideas? I'm using Yoast and this is an Elementor WP theme.

I've set the parent to locations so that the URL will look like this:

website/locations/ft-lauderdale

When editing this page in the dashboard, I've defined the URL slug as ft-lauderdale. Also, the title of the page is 'Ft. Lauderdale', and the slug in Yoast is ft-lauderdale:

However, when I view this page, the URL shows as /locations/springfield-2 :

I don't know why this is happening. There's also a 404 error, but the page exists in the dashboard? Anyone have any ideas? I'm using Yoast and this is an Elementor WP theme.

I've set the parent to locations so that the URL will look like this:

website/locations/ft-lauderdale

• categories
• plugin-wp-seo-yoast

• 1 So if you click the preview link from the backend you are getting redirected to /locations/springfield-2? IIRC Yoast generates a redirect automatically if the page gets renamed. So you should check if there is something in the Yoast backend settings. Otherwise you can try $ curl -I website/locations/ft-lauderdale and check the response headers and see e.g what charset is returned. If it's e.g. iso-8859-1 it's an indicator the redirect is made by your webserver. If it's utf-8 it's mostly done by WP itself. This for sure depends on your server settings… – Fabian Marz Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 15:47
• The page has been published - so it's the view link instead of preview, but yes. I had created both springfield and ft. lauderdale pages in the past, but moved both of them to the trash and deleted them permanently in order to try and start over because of this problem. I will try the curl command.... – HappyHands31 Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 15:53
• Does doing a curl command require ssh? We're using flywheel and it says this services allows sftp connections only. – HappyHands31 Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 16:04
• Could you check yoast/help/my-redirects-do-not-work/#manager? Depending on your server configuration cURL commands might be blocked, yes. But you could also SSH into your server and run it from there. – Fabian Marz Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 16:08
• Is this a WP problem or a Yoast SEO problem? Keep in mind that 3rd party plugin dev support is offtopic here, if you need help with a Yoast problem you need to ask in a Yoast SEO community or contact their support, not here – Tom J Nowell ♦ Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 16:21

1 Answer 1

I had no idea if this was somehow related to wordpress configuration, or yoast, but I learned that this error was caused by the redirection plugin. It was monitoring permalink changes and created records that it didn't need to, and associating new pages with those records. Deactivating the plugin allowed me to create new pages with the intended URL.