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Would love to buy the PRO version, however I want to know if the “soft 404” error bug has been fixed. I know you say that it is not important for SEO, but I also know that this is not right.
Howdy Nevis,
It would be my pleasure to answer your questions regarding this.
We have had multiple SEO experts investigate our practices here. I am no slouch in the field myself, and have also done my due diligence. Our plugin is doing exactly what Matt Cutts and Google’s documentation recommends. According to Google’s documentation every eventĀ archive page on your site that has a soft 404 will impose no penalty. Why? Because they all have a valid robots meta tag with the noindex flag set. Since it’s not indexed, there will be no penalty.
If you know something Google’s SEO spokesperson and official docs are not telling us, or have simply found a flaw in our reasoning, we are all ears š . We would seriously love to put this thing to rest. But the real “bug”, or rather opportunity for improved UX, seems to be with Google’s Webmaster Tools. They make no distinguishment between soft 404s that will impact SEO and those that do not. So Google leaves it up to you, the user, to do no small amount of investigating to find out if a specific soft 404 is a problem or not.
In our case we either have to do hard or soft 404s for those pages. We used to do hard ones but Webmaster Tools notifiesĀ about those too. According to GoogleĀ it does not matter what we do so long as noindex is set. So we switched to soft, only to find out it will notify you of those too. There is no solution here until Google fixes its tools.
Cheers!
– Brook
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
- The topic ‘Soft 404 Errors’ is closed to new replies.