How to get rid of extra WordPress pages?

Question

Apache HTTP Server

Good afternoon! Dear experts, WP has created categories from the CMS itself and plugins that act like pages, although nothing links to them. Having not found a solution on how to disable them (so that unnecessary pages would not be created), I decided to redirect to the main one. There are such categories with pages as:
/testimonial-category/* - reviews plugin (I made a page where all reviews hang, but the plugin creates pages separately for each review)
/media_category/* - categories plugin in media (needed for convenient distribution of media content in CMS itself)
/category_media/* - plug-in categories in media (needed for convenient distribution of media content in the CMS itself)
Advise how to deal with them correctly from the point of view of SEO? In robots.txt, they have already been added to Disallow. But search engines still see these pages without the normal design, descriptors, and so on. I want to get rid of what I don't need. Is a 301 redirect to home a good idea?
And if not difficult, tell me how to do it right? I found this solution -
RewriteRule ^/?category_media$ / [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^/?category_media/ / [L, R=301] works

Answer 1

This is the WP architecture. It consists by default of pages, posts, and categories. All these units always have an url.
As I understand it, there is a reviews page (it’s also a rubric) and it displays a lot of reviews records. Each review has its own url and is available at this url - even though there is no link anywhere. In general, you can’t do anything with this, except to create a page instead of a heading and insert all the reviews with content there. This is not the way out.
The output is correct sitemap. Most likely, links are taken from there that are not listed anywhere (there is a small probability that something else is from rss). You need to properly configure the sitemap through a ready-made plugin.

Answer 2

Install a plugin like yoast seo
Hide unnecessary sections, pages (page categories) from indexing

Answer 3

You don't need to do a redirect.
For WordPress, the ideal solution would be to install the yoast seo plugin. It is by far the most up-to-date. In his settings, you can close objectionable elements from indexing.
Also, write Disallow in the robots.txt file and indicate unnecessary URLs. This method 100% works. Just be sure to send the entire site for re-indexing in Google and Yandex. Within a couple of weeks (maybe sooner). To insure in Yandex, you can write. To support. And to say that this is the situation, I did this and that ... And ask them to look at the site. Will definitely look.
Yes, and above, Ivan said that you need to install a sitemap plugin for search engines. This is what it should look like: sitemapPlugin settings can be left as default. Just click generate map to create it.
Then, be sure to visit the webmaster's office of search engines: Yandex, Mail, Google, rambler, bing, etc. add your sitemap.
This will help you in promotion too))