Can't delete blog categories

[crimsoncorporat]

I have a problem with deleting blog categories. As I understand it, these pages should stop appearing once all blog posts tagged with the category have those tags removed. I did just that, but the categories are still there, leaving empty pages:

• Example 1: https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/zufall
• Example 2: https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/wettmodell
• Example 3: https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/wetttheorie
• Example 4: https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/wettmodell
  
  

In terms of SEO this obviously creates more problems than I was trying to solve in the first place, as these now are all pages with duplicate content. I tried to unpublish and then republish the whole website already to force an update of the sitemap (not sure if that could have been the reason, but I thought it's worth a shot), but to no avail.

Am I doing something wrong, and can this be fixed somehow?

[crimsoncorporat · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your quick responses, Adam.

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@Adam wrote:

After removing all of the posts, did you re-publish your whole site, @crimsoncorporat?

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Yes, I did. That didn't help, but I think I solved the issue except for one last weird hold-out.
It turned out that I still had old links pointing to those category pages. After removing those, SEMrush has almost no complains any more.
With one excpetion:
https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/value remains. Apparently http://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/value (the old http link instead of the current https one) still links there, so it hasn't vanished.

Any idea how I could fix that?

[Adam7]

After removing all of the posts, did you re-publish your whole site, @crimsoncorporat?

[crimsoncorporat · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your quick responses, Adam.

---

@Adam wrote:

After removing all of the posts, did you re-publish your whole site, @crimsoncorporat?

---

Yes, I did. That didn't help, but I think I solved the issue except for one last weird hold-out.
It turned out that I still had old links pointing to those category pages. After removing those, SEMrush has almost no complains any more.
With one excpetion:
https://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/value remains. Apparently http://www.crimsoncorporation.de/wettblog/category/value (the old http link instead of the current https one) still links there, so it hasn't vanished.

Any idea how I could fix that?

[Adam7]

Hmm... Do you know where those https links are linked from?

[crimsoncorporat · Accepted solution]

Problem solved... there was one last page left that had a http category linked, which caused a redirect to the https version. Removed the link and all was gone.

Thanks for helping out and sorry for the hassle.

[Adam7]

Ahh! No problem at all! You did all the hard work, and hopefully this will help anyone else out with the same issue.