Events for specific dates for years past are generating 404 errors

[lbramirez]

Hi I have looked at the threads and made the updated recommendations (add code to functions.php avoid_404_event_titles & added single-event.php to my theme) but still the http://tools.seobook.com reports 404 for these non-existent pages. Why is Google even trying to read an old event such as: http://petfriendlypdx.com/events/2003-09-28/ ?? Some reported as far back as 2001? My sitemap.xml does not include any of these.

[Barry]

We’ve been aware of general issues along these lines and I believe some changes were effected in our last release to help with this. I do notice however that on that URL dated 2003 the robots meta tag is instructing bots to index them (it should be instructing them not to) – I wonder then if some other facet of your system is interfering here.

You can basically see this by going to that same URL and viewing the source. Where you see:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

I would expect to see:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Can you confirm if deactivating all other plugins and switching to a default, unmodified theme resolves this?

[lbramirez]

I did find that I had BOTH version of the “robots” meta, the “noindex” was the second one. This is after adding a single-day.php file with code to add noindex (<?php if (!$has_events) echo ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ ?>) similar to what I had previously added to the single-event.php file (found on your forum). Have not seen the error reported since. Thanks for the follow up! Laura

[Barry]

Great!

And as this thread’s not seen much activity recently so I’ll go ahead and close it. Of course if you still need help with this or any other issue please don’t hesitate to create a new thread (or threads) and one of the team will be only too happy to help. Thanks!

 

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