Hundreds of 404

[Michael]

Hi,
since some days I get in the Goo.. Webmaster Tools hundreds of 404 like:
veranstaltungen/action~posterboard/page_offset~1/time_limit~1437656401/tag_ids~83/cat_ids~43/
veranstaltungen/action~agenda/page_offset~1/time_limit~1407139483/tag_ids~90/cat_ids~42/
veranstaltungen/action~posterboard/time_limit~1412373600/cat_ids~43/tag_ids~93/
veranstaltungen/action~posterboard/page_offset~1/time_limit~1433664001/tag_ids~94/cat_ids~41

I am talking about over 600 warning with 404?
Any idea what is producing that?

regards
mike

[Jami]

Hi Mike,

It’s great to hear from you again and thanks for getting in touch about those warning messages. I think I can help sort it out. First I want to mention that the Events Calendar plugin does create a number of soft 404s, mostly due to events not being present on Day Views but we do have a small plugin you can install that will remove them for you. You can download it it here and install it as is.

Let me know if that helped!

Kind Regards,
Jami

[Michael]

Hi Jami,

I installed the recommended plugin and waited now several days.
The 404s in the Goo.. WMTs are showing meanwhile not only some hundreds, but 13056 (thousands) of 404s.

The WMTs do not show them under “soft 404” but under the “normal 404”.
Everyday now some thousand more?

One mor information to this, because it might be of help?:
– our site is under SSL (https). Of course you can look it up also under “http”
– the WMTs under “https” do not show this 404s. Only the WMTs under normal “www”

regards
M

[Jami]

Thanks for getting back to me, Mike. Here are a few more things I’ve thought to try:

1. Check that your .htaccess file is setup properly.

2. Navigate to Admin > Settings > Permalinks and re-save your permalinks

If that doesn’t help, can I ask you to run through our standard troubleshooting steps?

Kind Regards,
Jami

[Michael]

Hi Jami,

to your No 1.
Could you give me an example what could be wrong with the .htaccees concerning the calendar?

regards
M

[Michael]

Hi again,

I checked our access logs again today. A lot of calls are going still e. g. to: ……/veranstaltungen/action~posterboard/page_offset~1/time_limit~1420372801/cat_ids~40/tag_ids~145/

and these are still 404s?

regards

M

[Rob]

Hi there Michael! My apologies for the delayed reply here; Jami has unfortunately left us and we didn’t notice this thread was due a reply until now. I wanted to let you know this has been delegated elsewhere and another team member should be replying shortly. We appreciate your patience so far.

[George]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for being patient while we shuffled things around and came back to to your issue here.

I’m curious about your issue here because of what you originally reported – for example, slugs like this:

veranstaltungen/action~posterboard/page_offset~1/time_limit~1437656401/tag_ids~83/cat_ids~43/

What about these lines of text make you think these are specifically related to The Events Calendar?

Also, would you be able to temporarily deactivate The Events Calendar altogether, and see what if anything in your Google Webmaster Tools changes?

Thank you!

[Michael]

Hi George,

welcome!:)
1. It is related to the calendar (I think) because in this URL the words:
“veranstaltungen” = is the german word for events and was exchanged by me.
“posterboard” is only used in the site in relation with the calendar.

2. these problems showed up after installing the new calendar. We had installed before a similiar calendar. You might know it? mhhhh .. would it be possible that these URLs were produced by the old one? On the other hand we did not use the word “veranstaltungen” in the old one?

3. we are not able to deactivate the calendar at the moment.

regards
M

[George]

Thanks for the information Michael! Would you mind elaborating a bit more on one more thing you mentioned?

Specifically, you wrote this in your reply:

“posterboard” is only used in the site in relation with the calendar.

What exactly do you mean by this? What is the “posterboard” on your site and how are things configured?

Also, one thing to note here is that as long as you don’t get real 404 errors and missing pages on your site while using it, then Google Webmaster Tool’s own reporting of 404s for things where it’s trying to crawl may not be a huge problem, and shouldn’t cause any problems to your actual end-users.

That doesn’t mean we can’t try to fix this! 🙂 I just wanted to note it here.

Thanks for your patience with this issue Michael, it means a lot!

— George

[Michael]

Hi George,

sorry for my late reply.
I think I looked on the wrong end. Since I am not into coding etc.

We had before installed another calendar and switched for certain reasons to yours. Which, I think, was definitely the right idea. The other calendar used instead of your “photo” view the “posterboard” view. I think for some reason it produced (or is still producing) thousands of this type of 404s.
Even if we have that calendar taken off?

Regards
M

[George]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for this additional information, some sort of remnant of your original calendar option could indeed be the source of your problems here. I’m not quite sure why, though – all I know is that “posterboard” is not something that by default would be coming from The Events Calendar itself.

That fact would likely mean that either a) the “posterboard” reference is from a customization you’ve made to your instance of The Events Calendar or b) as mentioned above, something from your original calendar plugin is the problem here.

To investigate Possibility A here, I’d recommend double/triple-checking any possibility of code customization you have made to any aspect of our plugin. If any such customizations exist, then make a backup of them but then temporarily remove them from your site. See if any issues persist.

To investigate Possibility B, I’d recommend contacting the support team of that other plugin – this may be an issue they’ve seen before, or can otherwise offer some insight about.

I’m sorry that neither option here is very compelling, but I’m just failing to think of something further that we can do with The Events Calendar itself. If I’m able to think of something, I’ll post here, and hopefully you post too if you’re able to contact your original plugin’s support team and such.

Thanks for your continued patience with this issue Michael! It means a lot to us.

George

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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