What Is This Issue?
If your Site Auditor report flags pages as containing redirect links — but you inspect those pages and the listed URLs are nowhere to be found — you are likely experiencing a WordPress admin bar false positive.
For example, the audit may report that /aim-tools/ contains a link redirecting to /about, but when you view the page in a browser or check its source code, that link does not exist. This is a known issue and does not indicate a real problem with your page content.
How to Recognise This Symptom
- Site Auditor lists redirect issues on multiple pages across your site.
- The flagged URLs (e.g. /about, /wp-admin/, dashboard links) are not present in the visible page content or HTML source.
- The same set of redirect URLs appears repeatedly across many different pages.
- The flagged links often point to WordPress admin, profile, or navigation destinations.
Root Cause: The WordPress Admin Bar
When a user is logged into WordPress while a site crawl runs, WordPress automatically renders the admin toolbar at the top of every page. This toolbar contains links to areas such as the dashboard, your profile, site settings, and custom menus.
Search Atlas's Site Auditor crawls pages the same way a browser would. If the crawler visits your site while a WordPress session is active, it reads the admin bar as part of each page's HTML. Any redirecting links inside that toolbar get attributed to every page the crawler visits — even though those links are not part of your actual page content.
This is not a bug in Site Auditor. The crawler is accurately reporting what it finds in the page HTML. The issue is that the admin bar should not be visible to the crawler at all.
How to Fix It
Choose one of the following remediation methods based on your setup.
Option 1: Ensure the Crawler Visits Pages While Logged Out (Recommended)
- Log out of your WordPress account completely.
- Open a private or incognito browser window and confirm the admin bar is no longer visible on your site's front end.
- Return to Search Atlas and navigate to your project's Site Auditor.
- Trigger a fresh crawl of your site.
- Review the crawl results after the crawl completes. The false positives should no longer appear.
This is the most reliable fix because it removes the admin bar from the crawled HTML entirely.
Option 2: Hide the Admin Bar for Non-Admin Users or Bots
If your site must remain logged in during crawls, or if you use a crawl user account, you can suppress the admin bar programmatically. Add the following code to your theme's functions.php file or a site-specific plug
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