Google Crawl Error: Increase in “soft-404” pages

[laughmasters]

Got this email from Google:

Subject: Increase in “soft-404” pages on http://laugh-masters.com.au/
To: Webmaster of http://laugh-masters.com.au/,

Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on http://laugh-masters.com.au/ that should return a 404 (not found) error, but currently don’t. This can cause a bad experience for your users, who might have been looking for a specific page, but end up elsewhere on your website. This misconfiguration can also prevent Google from showing the correct page in search results.

So we checked the pages and every single one of them is an event page.
See here: http://imgur.com/tCijf2A

What gives?

[Geoff B.]

Hey ET,

Thank you for reaching out to us with this message.

I am not sure what’s going on, but it is certainly worth investigating!
Especially provided the sudden spike.

I stumbled upon a previous thread on a similar topic: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/soft-404-errors-in-google-continued-in-latest-version-2/. I believe the resolution it contains might prove to be useful in your case too.

I have a couple of questions for you:

1. Are you still using Event Rocket (the reason I am asking is because there was a feature in it that could be responsible for it) ?
2. Could you take a look at your Yoast SEO settings and tell me what it is set at for “Custom Post Type Archive” ?

Best regards,

Geoff B.

 

[laughmasters]

Event Rocket is disabled.

We use “AllInOneSEO” and Custom Post Types, but there is no “archive” option we can see.

There may be a solution on the suggested support thread, but the crucial bits seem to be marked “private”

[Geoff B.]

Thank you for the quick reply.

OK, so let’s rule out Event Rocket then.

I apologize, it’s totally my bad about the SEO plugin.
So let me rephrase my question: Could you tell me what your settings are for custom post types in All-in-one ? (checkboxes, follow and index settings)

Also, I went ahead and tried one of the links from your Google Analytics screenshot (http://laugh-masters.com.au/events/category/level-2-sketch/2017-06/).
But I was met with the following message “No matching events listed under Level 2 Sketch. Please try viewing the full calendar for a complete list of events.”

I also did some extra research and found that we’ve uncovered a recently-introduced bug that is increasing soft 404 errors. It’s related to visibility of the event, more specifically when the events are set to private. Based on that finding, could you tell me what the visibility setting of the soft 404 events is ?

Cheers,

Geoff B.

 

[laughmasters]

This reply is private.

[laughmasters]

PS – updating to 4.0.7 now

[Geoff B.]

Hello again Eran,

I totally hear you and you are right, you have been incredibly unlucky with recurring events lately.
I do want to apologize for all the inconvenience this has caused so far.

Without attempting to downplay anything, the only relatively good news is that soft 404s are typically not a problem per se, but rather an over-reporting of diagnostic from Google tools.

But still, we need to get to the bottom of this to identify the cause.

With that in mind, thank you for sharing your SEO settings.
They look good so far.

Nofollow is the right setting, especially when it comes to future events.

I also wanted to thank you for the invitation to take look at these settings directly. Unfortunately, our policy does not allow us to log in to clients websites for several reasons, including liability.

I think this is a major bug.
We don’t even have any events planned, scheduled, drafted, posted or ticketed for 2017 so methinks TECPro is creating these somehow. (Note the “fix” for the no time on the first of recurring events was more of a hack. – so something is up with recurring events)

You might be right and we need to treat this with our full attention (also taking into account that we are running on limited capacity this week – I am sorry about the timing of this).

Would you mind sharing with me the recurrence settings for the http://laugh-masters.com.au/events/category/level-2-sketch/ event (understanding it should not extend to 2017). I would like to try to replicate this.

As for the fix, you are right, it is only a temporary solution. We will absolutely integrate a better solution in one of our upcoming maintenance releases.

As for the 404 errors – none of those events exist – at least not when we’re looking at Events on the WP Admin back end.

I know this might be cumbersome for you, but what would be great is if you could take a look at the DB directly to see if the said future events are in there somehow (even though they are not showing up in the admin interface). Would that be possible ?

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[laughmasters]

Recurrence for Sketch Level 2:
Start D&T: 19/04/2016
End D&T: 19/04/2016
Recurrence Rule: Every week and will end on 07/06/2016

I’m not skilled up enough to start digging into the db without guidance/instructions.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Eran,

Thank you for sharing the details of your recurrence event

Fair enough about the browsing. Luckily, there’s a plugin to do just that 🙂

Take a look at: https://wordpress.org/plugins/database-browser/

Once installed, you can easily browse through your wp_posts table and even export it if you want to.

What you are looking for is tribe_events post_types

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

[laughmasters]

Installed the plugin. Found posts. I have over 2500 of them.
No export option.

I see some tribe_wooticket and tribe_events in there… none of them seem to be future events other than the ones we expected to see.

[Geoff B.]

Hey again,

Thank you for installing the plugin and making sure these entries did not exist.
If you actually are interested on exporting the DB, you can do so using the buttons seen on the second screenshot on the following page (CSV, XML,etc..) : https://wordpress.org/plugins/database-browser/screenshots/ 

I did some extra research of my own on the topic and browsed your site to make sure that there is not a bug on our end.

Our plugin specifically sets the following tag on month and similar views: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />. In fact, you can see that in the source of each of your website’s page.

According to Google if you have multiple tags, which often people with Yoast do, Google says they will follow the strictest of those. If ours says noindex and Yoast says index (which it by default does) our plugin should win.

You can read all about it here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag#using-the-robots-meta-tag

So to make a long story short, it does look like Google is not following its own rules. As such, this is a bug on their end, according to their documentation.

If you are up for it, I would encourage you to report it as such to them. Especially since it looks like they are using data that does not even exist on your site!

If you are not up for it (which I would understand), soft 404s are not an issue but rather a suggestion / warning at this point in time.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but for now it’s the best one I have.

Let me know what you decide on.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

 

 

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