Webmaster tools flooded with 404s

[Neil]

Hi there

Just checked my webmaster tools and it looks like the events section is flooding the stats with 404s. I’m seeing a lot of entries on the format of /events/20xx-xx-xx/ for dates which have never had events on them.

If you go to a page where there are no events, is it actually delivering a 404 response?

[Neil]

Noticed this is also happening on past events too.

[flamsteedas]

I’m seeing the same thing.

[Neil]

Just checked the headers and confirmed both of those scenarios are returning a 404.

(http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/)

[Barry]

Hi Neil,

Are you using any sitemap/SEO tools such as additional plugins or does your theme have any built-in capabilities in this vain? We would really need to pin down the source of those URLs and then deal with whatever is generating them.

[Neil]

Hi Barry – think it’s as well to carry on in Cynthia’s thread here:
https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/404-not-found-in-page-title/#post-54160

[Barry]

Hi Neil,

That’s very much a different problem, so let’s keep the conversation going here. From the details you posted in the other thread:

We’re using (and have tried deactivating) the following:
All In One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps
Safe Redirect Manager

Are you able to inspect the generated sitemap? Does that contain the erroneous URLs?

[Neil]

Hi Barry
No, none of the individual day listings appear in the sitemap. I should clarify that there are no erroneous URLs as far as I can tell. The problem is valid pages are resulting in a 404.

[Neil]

Out of curiosity, I went and found the first post on here where the poster was using 3.0 and managed to replicate the problem – go to an empty date and the headers return a 404.

[Neil]

And also happening on this page of your live demo.

http://wpshindig.com/events/2013-07-12/

I’d assume the Next Day / Last Day links are the route through which Google is crawling through to every eventual permutation of the URL above.

[Barry]

If you go to a month view where there are no events, then yes that is being treated as a 404 (because no posts – in this case the posts represent events – are found): in that case what you are seeing is indeed similar to the other thread, albeit the focus there was on removing the “Page Not Found” text from the title tag.

I’d still like to handle this one separately, simply to keep things nice and tidy. Bear with me while I do some checking and talk with the team.

Thanks!

[Neil]

That’s fair enough Barry – I’m all for tidyness. I just wanted to make sure we were all clear on the problem I’m hoping to see resolved.

Thanks for your efforts

[peeld]

I just purchased and installed, and an empty calendar month returns a 404 for me as well.

[Barry]

Hi guys, sorry first of all (Neil) for the delayed response. We’ve been under a lot of demand in terms of requests for support so we haven’t been quite as fast to answer as normal, for which we apologize.

To give you the background, The Events Calendar is pretty much following the practices laid down by WordPress itself here – an archive (whether an archive of all events in a single day or in a particular month) is being requested and is empty. In comparable circumstances – albeit dealing with posts – returning a 404 status is also the course of action taken by WP itself.

However, we do recognize this isn’t quite the same situation and it’s not necessarily an ideal course of action here. For that reason, this is being filed as a bug and since we’re now back into the swing of releasing regular maintenance releases we should be able to get a fix in place for this sometime very soon.

[Clayton Smith]

Just wanted to leave a snippet that worked for me with the Structure theme. Removes the 404s in the title. For some reason the snippt from the other thread caused problems. Seems to be unique to the Structure theme.
http://pastebin.com/R6M6HEEW

[Author]

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