Google Search Console Warning

  • Resolved nikdow

    (@nikdow)


    10 years, 1 month ago

    Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on http://www.otu.asn.au/ that should return a 404 (not found) error, but currently don’t. This can cause a bad experience for your users, who might have been looking for a specific page, but end up elsewhere on your website. This misconfiguration can also prevent Google from showing the correct page in search results.

    The pages listed by Google Search console are events by date, where the date has no event. Their warning is wrong, because a 404 would be inappropriate here, however I’m wondering if a recent change to the plugin might have triggered Google-bot’s concern.

    Typical example of URL listed by Google is
    http://www.otu.asn.au/events/category/act/2015-06-01/

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • joinfof

    (@joinfof)

    10 years, 1 month ago

    Hello and thanks for posting,

    This Knowledgebase article goes into detail about 404 errors and our plugin. Let me know if you have any additional questions 🙂

    Thread Starter nikdow

    (@nikdow)

    10 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for the link, explains it very well.

    Personally, I think the page as presented is perfectm with the short explanation on no events.

    I’m guessing Google is telling me that these pages won’t be indexed, and that’s a good outcome.

    Google is listing the individual event pages, and that’s the important thing.

    nicosantos

    (@nicosantos)

    10 years ago

    Hi nikdow,

    A good way to check if Google is indexing your page is to search for the full event URL. That might help you to see if it’s indexing or not!

    Best,
    Nico

    Thread Starter nikdow

    (@nikdow)

    10 years ago

    Yes, as I said above, “Google is listing the individual event pages”, that was the first check I made, so it’s all good.

    I guess this is all Google’s attempt to cope with CMS that provide designed 404 pages that are hard to distinguish from normal pages. That’s a good outcome as well because we don’t want those boring pages indexed.

    But a better solution that your plugin could employ would be to add a meta tag to the page <head> as follows:
    <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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  • 4 replies
  • 3 participants
  • Last reply from: nikdow
  • Last activity: 10 years ago
  • Status: resolved