Calendar PRO auto adding URLs for event categories

[Kim]

I just received a report from Google Search that they are finding several pages that have been auto created by the calendar, that I have NOT created. Attached is an image from this report. As you can see the URLs start correctly, but then there is a date at the end of each…there are NO events for these, yet the system has created a date for every week, some daily for these events. Now I have reported 131 errors – this is BAD because Google will rank my site lower if there are errors showing when it crawls.

I need you to look into this, because this is a NEW error. I added the one Tournament last week on 3/18… just before google crawled the site…so in a weeks time all these bogus pages were created for google to find. How do I get rid of these and where did they come from in the first place??

I have created events for:
“High Belt Test” – only 2, maybe 3 dates
“Tournaments” – only 2 events – USA Taekwondo and Omega Youth Tournament
“Low Belt Test” – only 2 dates
“BB Annual Test” – only 1 event

[Caroline]

Hi Kim,

Thanks for taking the time to reach out, and I’m so sorry for the trouble here! This is certainly the first report we’ve seen of an issue such as this, so we’d love to take a closer look and see if we can determine what’s happening on your site.

It looks like these pages are archive pages or other types of views and are not “real” pages, per se, just different calendar views that have been accessed at some point. Can you confirm what type of error Google is reporting for each of these pages (assuming the same error is being returned for each page)? Any information you can share from your reports would be a great help to us in troubleshooting!

Thank you!

[Kim]

Yes they are all Soft-404 errors. And now there are even more errors since
I first submitted this error on Monday. Here is a screenshot of the report.

All the errors contain the same starting domains, and then it adds a date
to the end
calendar/category/testing/bb-annual-test/
calendar/category/tournaments
calendar/category/testing/high-belt-test/
calendar/category/testing/bb-annual-test/week/
calendar/category/testing/low-belt-test/

I have recurring events for calendar/category/classes/ but for none of the
above. Its like the system is trying to make the non-recurring events to be
recurring

[image: Inline image 1]

[Kim]

Yes they are all Soft-404 errors. And now there are even more errors since
I first submitted this error on Monday. Here is a screenshot of the report.

All the errors contain the same starting domains, and then it adds a date
to the end
calendar/category/testing/bb-annual-test/
calendar/category/tournaments
calendar/category/testing/high-belt-test/
calendar/category/testing/bb-annual-test/week/
calendar/category/testing/low-belt-test/

I have recurring events for calendar/category/classes/ but for none of the
above. Its like the system is trying to make the non-recurring events to be
recurring

[image: Inline image 1]

[Caroline]

Hi Kim,

Thanks for following up to provide some more information here! The good news is that since these are soft 404s (actually 200 OK), it’s unlikely that these errors will actually impact your search rankings–a 200 OK code is returned by default anytime a search or archive view is accessed that contains no events. You can read more about this behavior as it relates to SEO on our Knowledgebase here.

That said, we can certainly do our best to try and prevent these URLs from being crawled in the first place! We’ve provided a Knowledgebase article with some recommended steps here–would you mind taking a moment to work through the steps to flush your permalinks, then follow up with us once Google has crawled the latest version of your site to confirm whether the number of soft 404s has decreased?

Thanks, and let us know what you’re able to find out!

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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