Pre-loaded pages and change of slug

[Kate]

Hi Guys,
Apologises in advance as I am still learning about WP… but..
Your plugins were set up with the events slug, which I changed to classes (they also had some pages I didn’t need: locations, categories)…. however as I didn’t do this in a development site there are now old pages showing in google that are 404 (as I never used and deleted) I have since enabled a development plugin in but obv google still thinks they are there… two questions:
1. What would you suggest is the best way to sort my google search…. a) just wait b) re-make the pages I deleted but get them to point to somewhere useful?
2. I haven’t been backing up as much as I should (will do in future) I have been using a child theme tho, so when things have gone wrong I have just deleted the child theme… reverted back to a WP std theme and then started again… in the process of the themes being changed these preset pages (domain/events/locations etc) show again in the menu. I will try and back up better in future but if ever I swap themes I am worried these redundant pages will pop up again… so this is kind of connected to the first question… is there anyway to get rid of these hard-wired pages or should I just point them to something useful?

Hope this makes sense?

[Cliff]

Hi Kate. Thanks for the thorough information.

While we’re not your SEO advisors, I’d definitely recommend not letting things 404 indefinitely; if you know of a problem, you should fix it to avoid Google losing trust in your site and, possibly more importantly, having a poor user experience if someone arrived via one of those links and landed at a 404 instead of all your events.

If you’re getting 404s because you changed the ‘events’ and ‘event’ words to something else (like yoursite.com/calendar/), everything should be fine and you just need to redirect these 404s to their new location. This article might help with this task (third party information not guaranteed by us).

Regarding your theme: it shouldn’t be affecting your Permalinks, but it’s always a good idea to re-save / refresh your Permalinks settings after switching themes or plugins.

I hope this information helps!

[Kate]

Not exactly my question….. the page events/category got auto created by your plugin… I deleted it but as my site was live Google saw it and now it always comes up in the search…. I don’t want that page….

If you are saying I should recreate it then fine but ideally I don’t want it.

[Cliff]

Yes, our plugin creates /events (technically the tribe_events custom post type archive page) and pages like /events/category/cat-1 and /events/category/cat-2 (technically tribe_events_cat custom taxonomy archive pages)

But I do not understand how you would have gone about deleting any of those. Please explain more thoroughly what you did when you say you deleted those category pages.

Are you actually using the Event Categories custom taxonomy? If yes, please explain how/why you’re using them but not wanting their URLs to be generated.

[Kate]

In essence I changed the events slug to “class” and the only place I could see the pages with the events slug I deleted (and the links on the menu) However as I hadn’t put my “Website in development” holding page on google got a hold of these pages and is now referencing them in their search results.

??

[Cliff]

Thanks for clarifying. If you changed “events” to “classes” and “event” to “class”, here: https://cl.ly/382K0u271e0G, then you can go to your Permalinks settings and re-save them.

If that doesn’t work for you, please follow our recommended troubleshooting steps:

Could you please make sure all your Modern Tribe plugins (and WordPress core) are at their latest versions?

• Downloads / Version Numbers
• TEC Automatic Updates
• or TEC Manual Updates
• WordPress core updates

Once you verify you’re on the latest versions, please test to see if the issue is still happening for you.

If it is, please follow our Testing for Conflicts Guide (basically switch to TwentySixteen theme and deactivate all plugins and custom code other than Modern Tribe plugins) and see if that helps narrow down the cause of this.

If it doesn’t, please enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and share any PHP errors you see while changing tickets quantity, navigating your site’s home page, events page, single-event pages, and any other of your site’s pages relevant to this ticket.

Then, please share your System Information (while in Testing for Conflicts mode).

You might also see if you can spot any console errors at your site. (If needed, you may reference our KB article Using Google Chrome Developer Tools.)

Let us know what you find out.

Thanks.

[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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