Webmaster tools flooded with 404s

[Barry]

Excellent, thanks for sharing rivercenter 🙂

[Cynthia Lockley]

Hello,
I just checked my Webmaster Tools report. From July 8-14, I was also getting 1000s of 404s reported for dates when there are no events scheduled. Even into the future such as March 20, 2014. There are no reports for July 15 or today (July 16) yet. I am currently running 3.0.3. Perhaps Google Webmaster Tools hasn’t run a report for yesterday yet.

[Neil]

Hi Cynthia

It’s the same experience for us and 3.0.3 doesn’t fix this particular issue. I tried it out on a different install this morning and visiting an empty date still serves a 404. Sure it’ll still be the same on yours. You can see if you take the URL of an empty date and check it here:
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

Even if you’ve covered up the 404 error from your titles, it’s still there in the background 🙂

Cheers

[Barry]

Hi guys, 3.0.3 was a fix for one specific problem only – it didn’t include any changes to help mitigate this particular issue. We’ve got this issue on our radar however and the team are just considering the best strategy.

Thanks for your patience!

[Barry]

Something you could try in the interim, until we get a definitive fix out there, is overriding the month/single-day.php template so that links to days which do not contain any events are marked as nofollow, which should stop search engines from following them.

To do this simply copy this code and place it inside a file located as follows:

wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME/tribe-events/month/single-day.php

It’s not a complete answer – but may at least mitigate the problem to some extent.

[Neil]

Thanks Barry – good call. Will give that a shot.

[Barry]

No problem, hopefully it helps. One other thing you might try is adding this snippet to your theme’s functions.php file (or another suitable location). This should stop month views from returning a 404 status when they are empty.

So I hope both of those help, but if they do not the best idea will be to wait for a de facto solution that’s baked into the plugin itself.

[Cynthia Lockley]

Both those fixes seems to have worked. After I cleared cache, the http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/ test didn’t show any errors.

[Barry]

Excellent.

[tinfishworld]

Hey there Rivercenter & Barry…the Snippet you are referring to http://pastebin.com/R6M6HEEW ….where exactly are you placing that within the functions.php file? I have added it and it crashes my website..I just want to make sure it is going in the correct place. Thank you for your assistance!

[Barry]

Can you share your functions.php file so we can see where you positioned it?

[tinfishworld]

Sure…thank you: http://clematis.thetinfishrestaurants.com/prototype/docs/functions.php it still pull up the 404 Page Not Found

[wwa]

I was interested in this as well, as I don’t want to be penalized by search engines for having all those 404s. Weird thing is, I don’t even have a Tribe-events folder within my theme’s folder!

[Barry]

@tinfishworld: that URL leads to a blank document, could you try sharing it via Pastebin, Gist or a similar service?

@wwa: the suggested fixes should tide you over – you would need to create the tribe-events folder within your theme. Please see: https://tri.be/support/documentation/events-calendar-themers-guide/

Thanks!

[tinfishworld]

Sorry Barry…here you go. It begins on line 42: http://pastebin.com/ruBH42wP

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