More Googlebot indexing problems (/events/20xx-xx-xx returning 404s)

[kipkniskern]

I’m trying to clean up crawler errors after a couple of moves over 7 years of blogging, and I’m noticing lots (thousands) of googlebot 404 errors for (for example) /events/2009-10-30/ . I searched these forums, and this seems to have been a problem a while ago (2.0?), but I am on the latest version of Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro, and it’s happening now. I just tried adding /events/ to the disallow list for Google in robots.txt, but I’d prefer a better solution, if there is one. This isn’t critical, but it makes finding real 404 error problems a lot harder when the crawler errors list is filled with these errors. Thanks in advance.

[Barry]

Hi @kipkniskern,

We’re certainly interested in looking at different possibilities to solve this and you’re not the only person reporting this. One of the changes we introduced was to add a robot meta tag, which you can see on day view for the day that you referenced in your post:

<meta name="<a>robots</a>" content="<a>noindex,follow</a>" />

This instructs search engines not to index the page but allows them to follow it and navigate onwards which seemed like a good balance.

What we’d be interested in determining at this point is if the 404 messages you are seeing are purely diagnostic (ie, they are intended to help you track down possible technical issues on the site) or if you are concerned and have reason to believe that Google is warning of a more critical problem?

Thanks!

[kipkniskern]

I’m not an SEO expert by any means, but I don’t think the Google Webmaster Tools 404 messages are causing me any harm, other than to fill up the “crawler errors” report with entries.

In my particular case, this blog as moved a couple of times over the years, and I’m trying to do what I can do to clean up the 404 errors, most of which, like this one, don’t cause any particular harm, but are a bit messy.
Glad to hear there’s a noindex, follow on the pages.

I’m happy to just ignore the messages for the time being, and concentrate on the (many) more pressing issues I have as a part time WordPress administrator ;).

Thanks.

[Barry]

(Closing this out!)

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