i’m finding pages with 2038 dates in the URL

[sean]

i use SEOmoz and today it flagged as duplicate content/page titles dozens of pages (with no title) that i never created.

for example:
http://realgoodssolar.com/events/2038-01-14/
http://realgoodssolar.com/events/2038-01-15/
http://realgoodssolar.com/events/2038-01-16/
http://realgoodssolar.com/events/2038-01-17/
http://realgoodssolar.com/events/1970-01-01/

there are 19 in all, all formatted just like this. is The Events Calendar creating them somehow?

[Barry]

If I visit http://realgoodssolar.com/events/2038-01-14/ it reports “No events scheduled” … are you seeing these “ghost events” within the list of events in the admin environment, or do you otherwise have any further information on how SEOmoz is finding these links?

[sean]

no, they’re not showing up in the events list in admin. no idea where SEOmoz is finding them, but google webmaster tools isn’t listing them as duplicate content for me (and i can’t get them to show up in google search results). webmaster tools will, however, fetch those urls – in fact it will fetch any url in the /events/yyyy-mm-dd format.

i guess this might not be a functional problem with the plugin – just something i’ll have to wade through in SEO analytics…?

[Barry]

Hi Sean, you’re reply was marked as spam for some reason – so apologies for the delay in responding.

I’m not really sure what to suggest here – unless you (or someone) can point out otherwise I don’t believe our plugin generates links or references to those non-existent URLs and there isn’t a lot we can do about it.

If Google is intelligently guessing and trying out URLs then that is a different kettle of fish and you should seek advice from them on how to indicate that they should not do that (or search for existing solutions). Similarly if SEOmoz is misbehaving you’d really need to seek help using the plugin author’s own support channels.

I hope that doesn’t sound like we’re “shutting the door” here, we’re happy to help or fix anything where possible should it transpire that our plugin is the root cause.

[Barry]

Sean: I think the source of the problem may be as per the following thread. I’ll keep this one closed, but it may be worth monitoring:

https://tri.be/support/forums/topic/numerous-404-errors-reported-via-google-webmaster-tools/

[Author]

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