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Hi! I just purchased the pro version specifically for support around this issue. I’d like to resolve the 404’s.
I searched the forum and found this code from Brook and implemented this:
http://pastebin.com/RANJbEsRHowever when I crawl my site with screaming frog and respect noindex, I still get 19 404 errors.
Here’s an example:
Source:
HREF http://mydomain.com/ncidq-study-schedule/2015-04-04/
Destination:
http://mydomain.com/ncidq-study-schedule/2015-04-05/
Anchor:
Next Day »
Status:
404 Not Found
Follow:
TRUEErrors are all on Next Day » and « Previous Day
Howdy Lisa,
Those are indeed 404 pages. That snippet was not meant to change them, just provide some debugging info in certain situations. I apologize for the confusion.
In WordPress, when you have added a new category, say for instance you have created a category labeled “General” to your WP Post, it returns a 404 error. That is because it is technically an “Archive page”. Until you have actually put posts in that category and this category has actual content, it returns a 404. There are many reasons for doing this, but one of the most prominent is SEO. Search engines like Google do not like you having pages with no content, unless those pages return 404 errors. The 404s you are seeing are actually better SEO than if WP had returned a HTTP 200 ok! Some SEO tools might raise false alarms when viewing those pages, because they are not as smart as Google and do not realize that these pages are in fact empty and should 404.
So yes that page is a 404, because it also is an empty archive page. However Google should not be indexing it because it includes a noindex tag. Your page in fact includes 3 of them! And as Google states, they will obey the strictest of the three. If even one of them said noindex, but the other two said index, by Google’s own public statement they will not index this page. But in your case all three say noindex so you are especially safe.
In short, I would not worry about it if I were you. It sounds like your crawling tool is either not sophisticated enough to understand this or simply has a bug, possibly caused by your duplicate robots meta tags. Regardless Google claims they will not index the pages and they also state it is best practice for your site to return the 404 that it currently does. So you should be good. Do you have any questions? Does that address your concern?
Cheers!
– Brook
Thank you Brook. I had a bunch of these in Google Webmaster tools, so I’ll watch to see if they recur. I marked as resolved after I applied the code, but I’ll just keep an eye out.
These are different than the empty events, so I’ll just have to wait and see.
Thanks Lisa. If for some reason they are still showing up after a while let us know. It may take a while for Google to fully reindex the site. From what Google has said we should be good since they are specifically marked noindex. I’ll leave this open for at least a couple of weeks just in case your status changes.
Cheers!
– Brook
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