When creating events with The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro, you may see some soft 404s appear in the Google Search Console.
According to Google:
“A soft 404 error is when a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code. In some cases, it might be a page with no main content or empty page.
Such pages may be generated for various reasons by your website’s web server or content management system, or the user’s browser. For example:
- A missing server-side include file.
- A broken connection to the database.
- An empty internal search result page.
- An unloaded or otherwise missing JavaScript file.
It’s a bad user experience to return a 200 (success) status code, but then display or suggest an error message or some kind of error on the page. Users may think the page is a live working page, but then are presented with some kind of error. Such pages are excluded from Search.
When Google’s algorithms detect that the page is actually an error page based on its content, Search Console will show a soft 404 error in the site’s Index Coverage report.”
Soft 404s and The Events Calendar
When using our plugins, soft 404s can be generated when creating venues and organizers. When organizers and venues are created on your site, “empty” pages are generated automatically. These can be considered “empty pages” by Google, especially if no events are being organized by that organizer right now or if no events are taking place at a venue.
What’s important to note here is that soft 404s are not actually errors. This is because, technically, the organizer can have events soon, so Google is just alerting you that this page exists and does not have enough good content on it (yet!).
Next steps
Regarding soft 404s, the important takeaway is that they aren’t errors that need to be resolved on your WordPress site. This is just Google’s way of telling you that the page exists and doesn’t currently have enough content. Once you add more events for your venues and organizers, those pages will populate with enough content to resolve these errors on their own.
One thing you can do, if you’re using any third-party SEO plugin, is you can manually set an organizer or venue not to be indexed by search engines. But you’ll need to remember to undo that if you want that page to be indexed again once you have more content.