Soft 404 Crawl Errors in Google Search Console (cont.)

[Lance]

Hi,

This is a continuation of a discussion begun in this earlier posting.

I’m continuously seeing what appear to be TECPro links like those below being flagged by Google Search Console as Soft 404 errors:

School of Music and Dance, San Diego State University

Seaport Village, East Plaza Gazebo

Alice Birney Elementary

Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego

Indian Fine Arts Academy of San Diego

House of Pacific Relations

Joe and Vi Jacobs Center

I’m attaching a screenshot of my Google Search Console.

Checking these links, they all seem to be good. However, they lead to venues or organizers for which we have no upcoming events. I’d appreciate any suggestions for dealing with these.

Thanks! Lance

[Andras]

Hello Lance, welcome back!

Not quite sure why you are getting 404s on those pages as they do seem to exist.

How long are you seeing these? Can you get the google bot to re-crawl your site to check?

What happens if you mark them fixed?

Also here are couple articles on the topic that you might find helpful:

• https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/404_and_seo/
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en
• https://www.hallaminternet.com/what-are-soft-404-errors-will-they-affect-rankings/

Cheers,
Andras

[Lance]

Andras,

If I mark them as fixed, they reappear in the Google Search Console after a while.

The hallaminternet.com page for which you provided the link above refers me to the HTTP Status Code Checker site, which reports that all those TECPro created venue and organizer links are returning HTTP 200 responses. See screenshot below.

According to the author of that Hallam Blog page: “This is a prime example of a Soft 404 error, as the HTTP response code is indicating to search engine robots that the page exists and should be crawled. However, there is no content on the page that’s returned by the server.”

No content? I find myself still perplexed by this and would appreciate further recommendations.

Thanks! Lance

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Lance.

[Andras]

Hi Lance,

Hmmm… The thing that comes to my mind is, you are getting a 200 because the venue page does exist, and maybe google gives you a soft 404 because there are no events listed on that page. This is a hunch only, I’m not quite sure how google does its magic.

What you can try is to create an event for one of those venues and check if that makes it disappear. That would confirm my hunch.

In the meantime I will ask for a 2nd pair of eyes to take a look at this, to get another angle.

Cheers,
Andras

[Lance]

Andras,

I’d be interested to know how this can be prevented. No one can be expected to always have at least one live event at all of their venues.

Thanks! Lance

[Andras]

Hi Lance,

“soft 404s” are Google’s own concept and the exact criteria for what is and isn’t a soft 404 probably shifts a little over time.

We do take SEO seriously, however we can’t offer tailored SEO solutions, just like we can’t generally offer custom development services. Also, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for this.

The views that return no events, we could probably tweak them to return a straight 404 error, but probably that would be worse than the current situation.

Ideally what would you like to see here? Do they have specific thoughts on how we should handle the pages that trigger these soft 404’s? We’ve struck what we feel is a pretty good balance but we’re open to your thoughts and ideas.

Also, although we don’t really do this, I created a template override for you for the single venue page. If a venue has no events, then it will show nothing else, only the venue information. There will be no text like “There are no events found…”. If there are events, then they will show up. Give it a check. Instructions are at the top of the file.

https://gist.github.com/andrasguseo/5f3f4d32ca2a87482c47dd83da3008d7

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Cheers,
Andras

[Lance]

Andras,

Sorry, I’ve been out of town for my day job. I do very much appreciate your having taking the time to write out that code. Before I install it, I’m wondering whether it will be overwritten every time I update TECPro.

Also, and more generally, I’m still not understanding what it is about these empty venue pages, the the “There were no results found” message, that generates these errors.

Lance

[Andras]

Hi Lance, welcome back.

The code I shared with you is a template override , so you will need to create that file under wp-content/themes/[your-active-theme]/tribe-events/pro/views/pro/single-venue.php.

This also means that the file will stay there even when you update the calendar plugins.

Note though, that if you are NOT using a child theme, then with the update of your theme you might lose this file.

I’m still not understanding what it is about these empty venue pages, the the “There were no results found” message, that generates these errors.

By default how our venue pages work is that if you go to a venue page, then you will see the details of the venue, plus the events that take place there.

If there are no upcoming events for that event, then you will see the message “There were no results found”. So the page itself is found because the venue exists, however there are no events for the venue, thus the message.

As for how Google understands and translates this is a mystery to us. That is something that we don’t have access to.

I hope this explains. Please do let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

Cheers,
Andras

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

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