Soft 404 errors all the time

[kaniamea]

I get future days showing up as errors in my WTM all the time. I cleaned a few hundred on Friday and there are 20 new now. They look like this:

http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/2942-07/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/oahu/2225-12/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/maui/2105-02/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2039-08/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2035-08/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2035-05/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2032-06/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/oahu/2225-03/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/2015-11-20/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2030-02/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2029-04/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2029-03/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2028-05/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2029-09/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2029-02/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/2015-10-30/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/bigisland/2379-10/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/maui/2103-05/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/2938-06/
http://www.to-hawaii.com/events/calendar/island/kauai/2023-07/

What can I do to permanently fix future pages showing up as errors?

Thanks!

[George]

Hi Ivelina,

Sorry for your troubles here – there are several things to note.

First, these will not cause any actual problems on your site – they’re just a feature of Webmaster Tools that are supposed to help you find potential problem-areas on your site, but these are not problem areas because The Events Calendar intentionally treats Events pages that have no events as 404 pages. This is a standard pattern for software, and the 404s don’t break anything but just tell any other service or the page itself “hey, there are no events here”.

You should be able to disable this feature by downloading a free plugin by one of our developers Barry. He’s a great dancer and a great coder, so this plugin works quite well and has solved this problem for many users with the same concerns.

All you have to do is download it here → http://m.tri.be/no404s

Then, install it on your site and activate it, and that’s it! No settings pages or need to configure anything, etc. Just install and activate.

I hope that helps! 🙂

Cheers,
George

[kaniamea]

Thank you, George!
I installed this plugin.

[George]

Cool, thanks for the update. Has it mostly resolved your issues here? If so, I’ll close up the ticket, but feel free to post here or start a new thread if you any further questions/concerns/etc.

Thanks!
George

[kaniamea]

Hi George, I installed the plugin you posted here but the 404 errors are still there. Got 20 new today in my WMT account.

[George]

I’m sorry to hear that it isn’t helping much – this is a challenging issue to work with, and can be quite annoying for users so I’m really sorry about your frustrations with it!

Basically, it’s a bit of a paradox for two reasons:

Real 404s will be returned by The Events Calendar for a date that has no events.

Google WebMaster Tools will report such URLs as 404s, which is accurate, and while seeing 404s in your tools seems like a “problem” or “error” to fix, in fact it’s actually completely fine. You do not get penalized by Google for such links, and since nothing is there at these links it is good that they are accurately reading as 404s.

Alternatively, however, some users don’t like getting 404s when they actually use the site. The no404s plugin I shared with you can prevent this as far as direct user experience on your site, but can lead to “Soft” 404s within Google webmaster tools.

Just like “real” 404s, “soft” 404s aren’t an error or problem that needs to be fixed in Google Webmaster Tools – something isn’t “broken” in other words.

However, while soft 404s are a better user experience, they’re actually treated a little worse than “real” 404s by Google. You can read about this in more detail here → https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708

Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]).

The no404s plugin does just this, by design – it sets the status code of 404 pages from The Events Calendar as 201 status. This improve user experience in some cases, can cause the problems described above.

I’m sorry that there isn’t much more we can do here on this topic. We’ve been scratching our heads for months trying to come up with better ways for Google Tools to handle our events 404 pages, but we’re quite limited by the definitions of things that Google itself uses 🙁

Please let me know if any of this information helps, or if you have any other questions or concerns we can help with!

— 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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