Automatically Generated Detail Pages Appearing in Search Results Bug

The problem

When you drop a content type widget on the page and apply filters to narrow down the content that is shown, all of the items in that content type will have an automatically generated detail page, regardless if it meets the filtering criteria or not. While users can't access this page normally, Google has a way of finding out about this page and may show it in search results.

The Fix

Unfortunately there is nothing a user can do currently to fix this issue. It is an issue that has been identified by Progress, but they do not currently have a plan to fix this.

In our April 2024 code release, we fixed this behavior in the Academic Program content type. We plan on rolling this out to more content types in the coming months to improve the quality of Google search results.

Example

Filters applied to an academic program are not being applied to automatically generated detail pages. While these pages aren’t in the sitemap or linked to anywhere, Google is getting them somehow and showing in search results. We’ve identified a way to force a 404 (not found) result to show up on these pages that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

On this page (https://education.ucdenver.edu/continuing-education/certificates/detail), the widget has the following filters setup:

When you view the page, the filters are correctly applied, and you only see SEHD certificate programs in Education & Counseling. However, for every single AP item, there is an automatically generated detail page, regardless of it meeting this criteria. One example is this: https://education.ucdenver.edu/continuing-education/certificates/detail/72c019c1-3dc6-4385-930d-b49d2cab2cea, a Public Affairs program. These pages will now be redirected to /404, so in our example this will redirect to https://education.ucdenver.edu/404. Only programs that meet the criteria will show up on the site.