Thousands of URLs for every future date possible auto generated. Possible bug?

[Henry]

Hi guys

I have noticed something really odd. It seems thousands of pages have been automatically created on my site which tell me if an event has been scheduled for that future date. Some examples:

http://www.thirstcard.co.uk/events/2051-03-11/
http://www.thirstcard.co.uk/events/2046-04-29/
http://www.thirstcard.co.uk/events/2053-11-03

If you change the date in one of the URLs above and you’ll see that a new page has been created for pretty much every future date possible.

This seems to apply to everyone (I took the liberty of taking a look at some of the URLs posted in the ‘showcase’ forum).

Is this expected behaviour? or perhaps a bug? I would much prefer not to have thousands of URLs auto generated and hopefully there is a way to resolve.

Looking forward to your help.

I’d like to

[Henry]

Wondered if anyone else was seeing this? Scratching my head on this one. :{

[Jonah]

Hi Henry,

We’ve had a few reports of this but I thought it was resolved. Here is one thread: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/indexation-of-thousands-pages/#post-16960

Are you running the latest version of the plugins?

Cheers,
Jonah

[Henry]

Hi Jonah,

I am using 2.0.5 which is a later version than the version where the ‘fix’ was introduced (2.0.4).

Got hundreds of soft 404 errors showing up in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. All of them are the “day view” pages. Eg http://www.thirstcard.co.uk/events/2061-08-17

Could it be that Google crawled these pages and index them before the fix was introduced? I am hoping that I see no new soft 404s going forward…

[Jonah]

Hi Henry,

This should be fixed in 2.0.4+ so you should be good to go. But if not, let us know and we’ll take another look.

Thanks,
Jonah

[Henry]

Hi Jonah

Google crawled my site on 22/04/2012 and found the soft 404 errors on this date. I had 2.0.4 + installed at this point so the problem could well persist.

Could you take another look at this to make sure it has been resolved? I am not 100% sure it has been sorted on my site.

Did the fix put a noindex on all day view pages? Out of interest, what else has the fix done?

Thanks
Henry

[Henry]

Hi Jonah

I have an update on this. As per 13 May I am still getting 75 soft 404 errors showing up in my Google Webmaster Tools. All of these are the event day view URLs. I’m also getting 15 not followed errors and all of these the the event day view URLs as well.

Not sure what is going on with this but would like to try to get it resolved?

[Rob]

Hey Henry. Thanks for the follow-up here. This is definitely an interesting issue; resolving it is probably outside my and Jonah’s areas of expertise but I’ve asked our lead dev on the project to take a look and see what he can offer up. Apologies for the inconvenience in the interim and thanks for being patient so far.

[moderntribe]

Hi, Henry!
My guess is that the problem is, as you say, Google has already indexed the pages and is continuing to do so. My suggestion is to put the following code in your theme’s functions.php file: https://gist.github.com/2763669
It should stop google from indexing the day-views.
Let us know if that works for you, or if you need any other help. I hope you enjoy working with The Events Calendar!

[Jeremy]

I’m using version 2.0.7 and am still getting these notices from Google. I applied the code posted on gist that adds the “ to my individual pages. This is indeed showing up in my head but Google is indexing them anyway, because I am still receiving the emails and the Soft 404 errors continue to accrue. Here’s a link to a recently indexed page. http://fromhere.org/events/2012-05-27/ .. I’m wondering if the issue is that the meta tag is showing up at the bottom of the head, instead of near the top? Does anyone know if meta tag placement would cause Google to ignore the tag? Is anyone else who applied this fix still seeing the errors? Maybe changing the priority of the action would help? Any help would be terrific.

Thanks guys, such a great plugin and you have great support..

[Jeremy]

whoops my meta tag didn’t render.. that should say :

I applied the code posted on gist that adds the tag:
meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”
to my individual pages

[Rob]

Hey Jeremy. Thanks for the words here, and my apologies that this thread has slipped through the cracks until now. Any chance you can post your code into pastie.org or a similar service and share the link (assuming this is still an issue)? I can get Paul to jump back in and try to advise from there.

[Vincent]

Hi all,
I can confirm that I am seeing the same issue on my site as well. I have thousands of soft 404’s showing up in Google webmaster, and they all look similar to this:
http://offmetro.com/sf/events/1907-08-24/
http://offmetro.com/sf/events/2012-05-22/

Is this something that will be fixed in a future update, so I should wait? Or should I add the code to the functions.php file now? I’m currently using the latest version of events calendar.

Thanks again for a great plugin.
Vince

[Jamie]

I’m also experiencing this issue.

[Jonah]

Hi Vincent,

Adding this code: https://gist.github.com/2763669 – should fix the issue for you.

@Jamie – have you added the above code to your theme’s functions.php file?

[Author]

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