Google Crawl Errors Increase

[esgudger]

In early April, the number of Google Crawl Errors rose significantly. It jumped from around 20 to almost 300. All the url’s begin with event and they appear to be older permalinks created when an event is created.

An example is: http://www.misspaule.com/event/designer-stars-330-530-kids-sewing-2-2015-03-19/all/

This was a recurring event for twice a month class that started March 19, 2015. The crawl found the error 4/4/16. This is not quite a year after the last date of the recurring event.

It would appear that these are residue links from Events Calendar. The permalink was created when the event was created.

From my perspective, it appears that something significant has changed with Events Calendar. Not sure what that is. I am sure it was intended to help out in other areas.

However, I would like to get this site cleaned up by removing these errors with Google Crawl.

I do feel confident that current customers are not going back to 2015 looking for events that have passed. I would like to use common tools to help me keep this site running cleanly.

This site did use WooCommerce Tickets to process events. That product has expired. The example above did not use WooCommerce to book the event.

I now add code to each event directing the customers to schedule directly into GetTimely. This is a much simpler system for the teachers because they can also book orders over the phone or in person.

Any help will be appreciated.

Eric

[Hunter]

Hi and thanks for posting,

Can you provide any exact errors you’re seeing from Google? Often times, the errors you’re seeing aren’t exactly errors. If possible, can you please provide your System Information as a private reply?

I look forward to your response and thanks again for posting.

[esgudger]

This reply is private.

[esgudger]

Here is the Google message

Search Console
Increase in “soft-404” pages on http://www.misspaule.com/
To: Webmaster of http://www.misspaule.com/,
Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on http://www.misspaule.com/ 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.
Recommended Actions:
1 Identify the URLs with errors
Open the Crawl Errors report in your Search Console account to review the list of sample URLs. Check Crawl Errors

2 Fix the issue
Check your server and CMS settings to make sure that these URLs return a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP response code in response to requests for non-existent pages. You may need help from your server administrator or hoster for this step.
3 Verify the fix
Once you’ve fixed the URLs with errors, make sure that Googlebot can access and see your content properly, or that they return a proper error result code. You can verify this using Fetch as Google. Fetch as Google

Need more help?
• See the Crawl Errors – Soft 404 Help Center article.
• Ask questions in our forum for more help – mention message type [WNC-655200].

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

[Hunter]

Hello,

Thanks for getting back to me. Please review Google’s article on Soft 404 errors. This section really puts it into perspective:

The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It’s like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says “dog.” Just because it says it’s a dog, doesn’t mean it’s actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn’t mean it’s returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code.

We’ve also got a great Knowledgebase article pertaining to this question.

I hope this helps answer the question and alleviate some of the concerns from the message received from Google. Thanks for choosing PRO and have a good week.

[esgudger]

Thanks for adding your perspective to Google’s Help article. I had already reviewed this and the Tri.be KnowledgeBase article. I do understand that the Soft 404 response from Google’s web crawler did not specifically indicate that I have a 404 (“dog”) page.

It appears that the issue is isolated to events and that the issue has increased drastically. From my 2 foot view, this is a problem and it points to The Events Calendar. A review of the comments in the Forum section shows that others have mentioned a similar issue.

While I appreciate the re-enforcement that everything is okay with the Soft 404 response, how do we solve this?

My list is growing daily and at an increasing rate. Google sends me warning and wants me to correct the errors. The theory I am hearing is for me to ignore the warning from Google and not be concerned that this may “impact my search ranking”.

It is difficult for me to know if this will remain a false metric from Google.

What about the “Not Found” response relating to events? A great deal of these are found in my list. I am going through these and marking them as fixed. I am not sure why they are marked as “Not Found”.

I will be professionally disappointed should this not solve my problem and the issue is with Events Calendar.

Any help you can provide me to keep these Soft 404 errors from showing up would be appreciated.

[esgudger]

I have reviewed the “Not Found” events and they are Hard 404. Can you help me determine where these url’s are coming from?

[Hunter]

Welcome back,

Have you measured other metrics to see if your traffic has actually decreased from these errors? More specifically, has your search engine traffic gone down since you saw the email come through?

This is another good KB resource on how to go about Fixing HTTP 404 errors.

Let me know if it helps 🙂

[esgudger]

I followed the link for 404 errors. One of the links on that page takes me to a “You’ve been Glomar’d”. Which is nothing related to our discussion.

I am taking the hard errors links and trying to determine the issues.

First, I have an “About” page (/about) with links to Event Calendar for upcoming events with specific Event Categories. To keep results current, I have learned that I create a link that’s something like “events/category/…/upcoming”. I have been using this structure since adding Events Calendar. Now several of these links are 404 errors. They are all using the same structure.

When I roll over the link on the displayed page, the url has “/about” added. If I edit the original link and add the full .com structure, the page displays properly.

I do not know if adding the website portion of the url is a function of Events Calendar or WordPress 4.5.2. I think I saw this once before and Tri.Be had to do an update to correct.

For now I will update all urls, so I can eliminate this issue in future updates to Events Calendar and WordPress (hoping).

[esgudger]

Second, it appears that Event Calendar has created url that returns a hard 404 error and Google sees these urls.

Here is an example:

I created a event last year with a permalink of “/event/knitting-1000-1200/”. Somewhere there is a reference to “all/?tribe_event_display=past&tribe_paged=1”. I have no idea where this reference is with in the page structure (not my expertise). This link results in a 404 error. My guess is that it is your coding that created this.

I did look at the suggesting for “Flushing Permalinks”. This site already had the recommended settings.

I have 69 Event Calendar listings like this that are resulting in “Error 404” results.

What can I do to eliminate these results?

[Hunter]

Welcome back and thanks for the in-depth responses.

Any place you are using /upcoming/ in the URLs should be updated to /list/ – that won’t solve the basic problem of there being no events to show in some of those categories, but it will mean they basically point to the same place as you intended when you first set them up.

Also, if you take http://www.misspaule.com/events/category/adult-classes/list/ as an example – right now its empty, but we do set a noindex meta tag telling Google/other search engines not to index them.

It would be possible to make them return a hard 404 if that’s what you really want, but that would really be custom development territory and beyond what we can help you with here on the forums.

Last but not least… /event/knitting-1000-1200/ seems to me to be a recurring event with no upcoming instances and it redirects to /event/knitting-1000-1200/all/. We do set a noindex here also.

I do want to acknowledge the way that view behaves doesn’t suit everyone and that we’re reviewing possible ways to improve it. I’ve linked the report we currently have to this forum thread.

I hope this answers some of your questions and look forward to hearing back. Have a great remainder of your day.

[esgudger]

I am not following some of this logic or terms you are using.

You indicate that where I am using /upcoming/ I should be updating /list/. I am not following this. I have no links using /list/. So, I am not sure what this applies to or where this is used.

The event …/event/knitting-1000-1200/ was a recurring event that ended in December 2015. If it is set to noindex why am I having a problem with this and others showing up on the Goggle Not Found Error Report. Since there are no future events planned, a check of the link reports an error.

All that said, I have many similar events that were recurring and nothing scheduled for the future that do not show u as an error. For my view if there was some consistency in capturing older events and reporting them as hard errors, I would understand the report. But that is not the case.

this is a random selection of older events that are now being seen by Google as errors. When I investigate the url, I get the error code.

While I do understand that the net of this is probably unimportant, I do not know that for certain.

That discernment will only come if I understand why this is happening and if there is something I can do to eliminate this.

[esgudger]

I found a forum page indicating that there is patch for soft 404s. This is available while a solution is integrated into a future release. I do not know if this has been integrated in a release. The patch is located at http://m.tri.be/no404s. Is this something I should install as a solution?

[Hunter]

Hi and thanks for the patience,

Feel free to try out that plugin and see if it helps out. Please note it changes the status of hard 404s to 200s, so arguably it will increase your soft 404s.

If you visit http://www.misspaule.com/events/list, you can see that you do in fact have a page with /list/ (list view) in the permalink. So if you are using /upcoming/ in links you’ve created as stated above, it’s best to use /list/ instead:

To keep results current, I have learned that I create a link that’s something like “events/category/…/upcoming”

I wish I was able to go more in-depth with you on the matter as I understand there hasn’t been a concrete answer provided. Hopefully I’ve given insight on our position with regards to how our plugins handle hard and soft 404 errors. Additionally, I’ve brought this thread to the attention of my fellow support team members and we will continue to investigate as we’re always open to suggestions for improvement.

Thank you for the patience and willingness to work with me and have a happy Wednesday.

[esgudger]

Thanks, I do not want to create any more soft 404s. Glad I asked before I installed.

You recommend that I use /list/ in the permalink. I am guessing you are talking about my event permalinks. They are setup so that the next five Events show up in a column on the Home page. The Events on the page are based on dates entered in the WordPress Admin Events section. The permalinks here are directed to a specific date on a calendar or /all for recurring events. I do not change these permalinks much from what is offered when I sent of the Event. I do not know how /list/ will provide me a link to the Event. It is a way to get a list. I not following the logic of where this would be used on this site.

You suggestion on current results is the way the links are now.

I marked all the data with Google as fixed. I will see what comes back after the site is crawled.

The issue here is again the massive number of reported errors in a short period of time. And nothing has be determined as to a specific solution or reason.

[Author]

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