- This topic has 9 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 10 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
This has been an ongoing issue, and now I have some time to follow up on it.
Webmaster tools keeps reporting SOFT 404’s
How do I resolve this?I have this to enable diagnostics:
// This snippet adds diagnostic info to your sites <head> html comments
// If both is_404() & tribe_is_event_query() == true, it will output a noindex meta tag
// Tribe should be doing this already, but some plugins & themes strip these tags
// This function further tries to avoid stripping those tags by adding 100 priority to the action
// http://pastebin.com/RANJbEsR
add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘tribe_noindex_on_404’, 100);function tribe_noindex_on_404() {
$is_404 = is_404();
$tribe_is_event_query = tribe_is_event_query();$output = ‘<!– Tribe Index Test’.”\n”;
$output .= ‘is_404(): ‘.($is_404 ? ‘true’ : ‘false’).”\n”;
$output .= ‘tribe_is_event_query(): ‘.($tribe_is_event_query ? ‘true’ : ‘false’).”\n”;
$output .= ‘–>’.”\n”;if ( $is_404 && $tribe_is_event_query ) {
$output .= ‘<meta name=”robot” content=”noindex,follow” />’ . “\n”;
}echo $output;
}Howdy Lisa,
I would love to help you with this. We were just having a lengthy discussion about this earlier today, of which we have had many in the past.
Soft 404s are part of our calendar by popular request. We used to return a hard 404 on pages that have no events to show (for example if you have no months in August yet someone is viewing the month of August in your calendar). But after years of people requesting soft 404s we finally gave in, to my own chagrin.
The truth is that soft or hard 404s are actually pretty harmless as long as they are not indexed (which we have specifically made sure none of those pages are). I have dug through mountains of Google documents, webmaster blog posts, Matt Cutts videos, and so forth trying to find any mention that soft 404s actually harm Page Rank. Nothing says they do. However there are countless places where Google talks about these alerts being informational, letting you know there might be a problem link somewhere. But in this case there are no problem links.
If you would like to “fix” this there is really only one thing to do, have those pages give an HTTP 404 instead. I am tasked with writing a snippet to help folks like you do this, but we are a bit swamped with the new release and so it will be a few days before that’s ready. We have further discussed making this an option toggle in the backend for people to choose hard or soft errors on those pages. If you would like to use this snippet let me know and I will get back to you once is ready.
Does that help clarify things? Do you have any followup questions?
Cheers!
– Brook
Thank you Lisa!
I am happy to say none of those pages are indexed by Google. You can see in their source code that they all have:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
And if you try searching for them via Google you will notice none of them show up. For instance nearly half of those have the text “No matching events listed under IDPX” in the pages content. This search query on Google should show any page with the text “No matching events listed under IDPX” but as you can see in the two results neither is one of the soft 404 pages. These pages are not indexed by Google.
I do agree that the soft 404s notification are annoying, and kind of distract you from real errors. But unfortunately what Google chooses to notify you about is outside of our control. We have done our best to ease peoples experience here but there is only so much that can be done without being able to Control Google’s control panel. If you want to give people the ability to search by date, then any date with no results is going to have to return a soft or a hard 404 and either way Google will notify you about it.
Does that help clarify things. Do you have any more questions? Cheers!
– Brook
Howdy again,
Those two URLs are not 404ing for me either but they might have at a certain point in the past. Notice how they both have a page number in them. One of them is page 2 of the upcoming events, the other page 4. As time goes on the amount of upcoming events will fluctuate, at times there may be 5 pages worth, others times only 3. Once you get down to 3 pages the 4th one will no longer exist and generate some variation of 404. I am going to guess they were 404 on February 23rd based on what you’ve copy/pasted, but at the moment they are not.
Please do let me know if there is anything else. Cheers!
– Brook
- The topic ‘Soft 404s’ is closed to new replies.