Yoast still causing tons of 404s

[Micha McLain]

Hello. I recently started a topic at https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/1000s-of-404-errors-caused/. Brook provided a solution that seemed to work for removing these date driven 404s. I verified that the code
<meta name=”robot” content=”noindex,follow” />
was there as he asked, and it was and still is.

However, I still am getting literally thousands of 404 errors in web masters. Here’s an example URL that’s 404 http://www.jacksonvillefilmworkshops.com/events/2032-03-10/

Please help provide a solution. Thanks.

Micha

[Micha McLain]

By the way, you guys should put a URL on your sidebar to make it easy for users to get back to their forums. The URL is https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/users/username/

I’m surprised that it’s not there. I had to click a user, see the URL structure, then replace my user to even find this past topic. Not very efficient.

Thanks.
Micha

[Barry]

Hi Micha,

We’re actually working on a set of improvements for the forum as we speak 🙂

What you can do right now though is subscribe to topic updates by email (and those emails should include a link back to the topic itself). We’ll definitely aim for a more fluid user experience in the future, though – you’re absolutely right that there are a few kinks needing to be ironed out.

However, I still am getting literally thousands of 404 errors in web masters. Here’s an example URL that’s 404 http://www.jacksonvillefilmworkshops.com/events/2032-03-10/

So we’ve done a couple of things here.

One, as Brook explained, is that we set the robots flag to tell search engines not to index these pages and, as you pointed out, this is in place (and there’s no reason to doubt it’s not working just because 404s are being reported in webmaster tools: that may simply be helpful diagnostic information).

The second is that, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t link to empty days like the URL you posted from anywhere within the calendar. It’s not impossible though that some search engines intelligently realize the final URL segment (2023-03-10) is a date and they scan up and down the date range anyway, even if there are no direct links, or else are sophisticated enough to identify the datepicker.

If either of those cases are true I’m not sure how much more we can or should do here – we don’t necessarily want to outright make it impossible for people to view a specific date even if its empty and so returning an empty view with a 404 status, as we’re doing, feels like the most intuitive way to handle this.

I do note though that you gave this topic the title “Yoast still causing tons of 404s”: does that mean you’ve determined that this issue only occurs when Yoast’s SEO plugin is in use?

[Micha McLain]

Thanks for the response. I could be way off here as I’m not that much of a developer, but I would think that the best solution is to have the dates still searchable as they are, but to just not have it return a 404. Why can’t this date search show a webpage that doesn’t have an event, but that does NOT mean a 404 error. That doesn’t seem to complicated.

Also, I think there should be some controls to set some loose parameters on the overall dates. For instance, I noticed dates 50-60 years in the future being 404 as well as some 20 years in the past. I would make a setting that has a “start date” that allows us to select the absolute date of when the site calendar should go back to. Then, there should be a relative date for the future meaning a setting that says my calendar goes out 1 year or 5 years or whatever, but that date is always relative to the current date. This alone would reduce my 404s drastically. Then, if you coded these pages to show empty results but NOT actually be 404s (because they’re not), then I think all these problems would simply go away, regardless of what SEO plugin we used.

That said, I titled this with Yoast in the the title because as per the last thread, I was told that “it was Yoast’s fault” this happens. I was just trying to make the title as relevant as possible, even though I’m not sold that it is there fault. I have no way of knowing first hand though because I’m not a developer.

Thanks again for your time.

Micha

[Barry]

I would think that the best solution is to have the dates still searchable as they are, but to just not have it return a 404. Why can’t this date search show a webpage that doesn’t have an event, but that does NOT mean a 404 error. That doesn’t seem to complicated.

For us to implement that isn’t a complicated step at all and we certainly considered it.

Our impression though, based on our own testing with Google Webmaster Tools and by reading through their own advice on the topic is that this would result in an equivalent number of so-called “soft 404s” where they detect what is basically a large number of pages that should return a 404 status but do not.

This seems to potentially incur more of a penalty than returning a true or “hard” 404 and for that reason we avoided such a strategy (a 404 after all is not inherently evil in any way, it’s just a way of concisely communicating that no results were found).

Also, I think there should be some controls to set some loose parameters on the overall dates. For instance, I noticed dates 50-60 years in the future being 404 as well as some 20 years in the past. I would make a setting that has a “start date” that allows us to select the absolute date of when the site calendar should go back to.

We made a very recent set of changes and don’t for instance link to months, weeks, days etc outside of the populated date range.

So if your earliest event happened to be in February 2014 and you view that month, you will not (or should not) find a link to January 2014 … the same thing applies in reverse to your furthest out future event. That doesn’t stop a visitor (or a searchbot) from actually trying to access January 2014, though, and as before a 404 seems the only applicable response to such a request – but again we’re open to ideas on this front.

That said, I titled this with Yoast in the the title because as per the last thread, I was told that “it was Yoast’s fault” this happens. I was just trying to make the title as relevant as possible, even though I’m not sold that it is there fault. I have no way of knowing first hand though because I’m not a developer.

OK, no problem.

Certainly what we’re discussing here in this topic doesn’t on the face of it seem to have any connection to Yoast and possibly there was a misunderstanding in the other thread you referenced as it does seem like the snippet Brook provided was doing its job without interference.

Apologies for the confusion on that front and if you have any further thoughts on the points I raised we’re definitely interested.

[Micha McLain]

Yeah, I’m not sure about which way the 404s are better. It was just an idea. If the 404s don’t cause a problem, then maybe I don’t need to be concerned about it. I’ve just read in many places that too many 404s can hurt web rankings.

I’m glad you added that with the dates for the events. That should help out a lot. I realize that people can obviously still search for whatever, but it should make at least some difference. I just thought that when searching for a date that shows empty results, you could redirect to an editable page to give the customers whatever kind of message you want would be much nicer that a 404.

Just a thought.

Thanks,
Micha

[Barry]

Definitely a nice idea (and currently possible, in fact, as a customization that listens for 404s being set on events pages and redirects to some other page or post).

I’m a little uncertain as to how much uptake there would be for such a feature if it were “baked in” but certainly if you post it on UserVoice – and of course you are also welcome to post any further suggestions with regards to this issue in general or any other topic – we’ll monitor the number of votes it is given by the community and give it our consideration.

At this point though I’m not sure we can do too much more in the short term and will close this thread, but as ever please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed if we can help with anything else.

Thanks again 🙂

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