GWT reports 8,000 404 page not found

[Christopher Glaeser]

I installed Events Pro on December 23, 2013 and GWT is now reporting 8,000 404 page not found errors. I see there was a discussion in this forum last September but that thread was closed. Has this problem been resolved?

[Barry]

Hi!

We resolved a number of issues in connection with this, yes: can you confirm what sort of URLs you are seeing being indexed? Is there a common pattern to them at all?

Thanks!

[Christopher Glaeser]

Most of the 404 are of the form http://www.freelapusa.com/events/2003-02-25/

[Christopher Glaeser]

I visited Settings->Permalinks but that did not seem to help.

In the day view, what should Previous Day and Next Day point to if there is no event scheduled on those days? Should the links not be displayed? Or, should the links point back to some other view that actually exists?

Best,
Christopher

[Christopher Glaeser]

I noticed that the Event Pro demo will display days with no events scheduled and also includes Previous Day and Next Day links that are also days with no events scheduled. How do you keep Google from walking decades of empty days? This seems to be the source of my GWT error messages as Google visits thousands of days with no events scheduled.
See http://wpshindig.com/events/2014-01-30/

Best,
Christopher

[Barry]

So rather than detecting when the next day is that contains an event and linking to that, which would be a more expensive operation, we link to the next/previous day regardless of whether it contains events – and we also feel this is more intuitive for many or most users.

In order to stop these pages from being indexed however (since they correctly return a 404 status in the normal run of things), we set a robots meta tag instructing search engines not to index the page. What we can’t do is guarantee that this will be respected or that it won’t be overridden – whether by another plugin also setting the robots meta tag or by some other mechanism that might take precedence in the eyes of a given search engine (a sitemap, perhaps).

Does that at least provide a better picture of what is happening here?

[Christopher Glaeser]

Where do you put the noindex rule? In each event page or in .htaccess?

[Christopher Glaeser]

I viewed the source of days with and without events. The days without an event have the code:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
Why is Google reporting large numbers of 404 errors if the days without an event have a noindex?
Best,
Christopher

[Barry]

That’s a good question. Perhaps they aren’t respecting the noindex rule, which might be due to the presence of some other ‘competing’ mechansim like a sitemap? Or perhaps Google provides that information about 404s regardless of whether they actually index the pages – simply to offer useful diagnostics information to the webmaster. It’s very hard to guess … why not contact them and ask?

[Christopher Glaeser]

The number of 404 errors continues to grow exponentially. GWT is sending me messages daily. I deactivated Event Calendar and Event Calendar Pro. I’m hopeful that will clean up the giant mess that was created.

[Barry]

I’m sorry to hear you had to go to the lengths of disabling our plugins.

All I can really say at this point is that we are taking what we feel to be a reasonable measure by instructing bots not to index those pages. If that isn’t being respected then perhaps something else is in essence overriding those directives or else the 404 notices Google is supplying are intended to be helpful from a diagnostics perspective, rather than indicative of a falling page rank.

Without seeing first hand what Google is reporting re your site specifically it’s hard to suggest much else.

[Christopher Glaeser]

UPDATE: GWT has stopped sending error messages now that the Event Pro plugin has been disabled.

[Barry]

Thanks for the update.

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