Google – Increase in 404 Errors

[Erin Muck]

Dear Modern Tribe,

Hello! i recently launched a new site and am so glad it’s getting indexed, but was a bit alarmed to see a google webmaster tool warning in my email today about an increase in 404 errors. There are 220 errors and they are all associated with The Event Calendar. They look like calendar/page/13 and the details show this message:

Googlebot couldn’t crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page.

I just updated my Yoast SEO settings so that the Calendar aspects are not indexed by Google, but I also wonder what your advice might be? We are so very new, I don’t want to get penalized.

Thank you, Erin

[Cliff]

Hi, Erin.

We do not provide SEO ranking advice but as far as 404s go, it looks like you might want to add a rule to your robots.txt (editing the file directly on your server or via Yoast SEO settings–I think in the premium version only)

You can research the best way to do this, but you’d likely want to target anything with /calendar/page in the URL

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions on this topic.

[Erin Muck]

Thank you, I just added a robots.txt file. I appreciate it!

[Cliff]

You’re very welcome. As always when dealing with robots.txt, make sure to do the testing on your own to make sure you don’t do more harm than good.

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