{"id":1953400,"date":"2022-06-27T05:11:12","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T09:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/?post_type=tribe-knowledgebase&#038;p=1953400"},"modified":"2022-06-27T07:53:26","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T11:53:26","slug":"how-to-solve-soft-404s-on-google-search-console","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/how-to-solve-soft-404s-on-google-search-console\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Solve Soft 404s on Google Search Console"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>When creating events with <a href=\"https:\/\/theeventscalendar.com\/products\/wordpress-events-calendar\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro<\/a>, you may see some soft 404s appear in the <a href=\"https:\/\/search.google.com\/search-console\/about\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Search Console<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/search\/docs\/advanced\/crawling\/http-network-errors?hl=cs#soft-404-errors\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;A&nbsp;<code>soft 404<\/code>&nbsp;error is when a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist&nbsp;<strong>and also a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#2xx_Success\"><code>200 (success)<\/code><\/a>&nbsp;status code<\/strong>. In some cases, it might be a page with no main content or empty page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such pages may be generated for various reasons by your website&#8217;s web server or content management system, or the user&#8217;s browser. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>A missing server-side include file.<\/li><li>A broken connection to the database.<\/li><li>An empty internal search result page.<\/li><li>An unloaded or otherwise missing JavaScript file.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s a bad user experience to return a&nbsp;<code>200 (success)<\/code>&nbsp;status code, but then display or suggest an error message or some kind of error on the page. Users may think the page is a live working page, but then are presented with some kind of error. Such pages are excluded from Search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Google&#8217;s algorithms detect that the page is actually an error page based on its content, Search Console will show a&nbsp;<code>soft 404<\/code>&nbsp;error in the site&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/7440203?hl=cs\">Index Coverage report<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-soft-404s-and-the-events-calendar\">Soft 404s and The Events Calendar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>When using our plugins, soft 404s can be generated when creating venues and organizers. When organizers and venues are created on your site, &#8220;empty&#8221; pages are generated automatically. These can be considered &#8220;empty pages&#8221; by Google, especially if no events are being organized by that organizer right now or if no events are taking place at a venue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What&#8217;s important to note here is that <strong>soft 404s are not actually errors<\/strong>. This is because, technically, the organizer can have events soon, so Google is just alerting you that this page exists and does not have enough good content on it (yet!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-next-steps\">Next steps<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Regarding soft 404s, the important takeaway is that they aren&#8217;t errors that need to be resolved on your WordPress site. This is just Google&#8217;s way of telling you that the page exists and doesn&#8217;t currently have enough content. Once you add more events for your venues and organizers, those pages will populate with enough content to resolve these errors on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One thing you can do, if you&#8217;re using any third-party SEO plugin, is you can manually set an organizer or venue not to be indexed by search engines. But you&#8217;ll need to remember to undo that if you want that page to be indexed again once you have more content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When creating events with The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro, you may see some soft 404s appear in the Google Search Console. According to Google: &#8220;A&nbsp;soft 404&nbsp;error is when a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist&nbsp;and also a&nbsp;200 (success)&nbsp;status code. In some cases, it might be&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1955565,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_swpsp_post_exclude":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,93],"tags":[43],"stellar-product-taxonomy":[161],"class_list":["post-1953400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-google-search-console-errors","category-errors","tag-google-search-console-errors","stellar-product-taxonomy-the-events-calendar"],"acf":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":124,"label":"Google Search Console Errors"},{"value":93,"label":"Troubleshooting"}],"post_tag":[{"value":43,"label":"Google Search Console Errors"}],"stellar-product-taxonomy":[{"value":161,"label":"The Events Calendar"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/images.theeventscalendar.com\/kb\/uploads\/2023\/02\/social-share-1024x538.png",1024,538,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Jaime Marchwinski","author_link":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/author\/jaimetri-be\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":124,"name":"Google Search Console Errors","slug":"google-search-console-errors","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":124,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":93,"count":6,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0","cat_ID":124,"category_count":6,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Google Search Console Errors","category_nicename":"google-search-console-errors","category_parent":93},{"term_id":93,"name":"Troubleshooting","slug":"errors","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":93,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":67,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0","cat_ID":93,"category_count":67,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Troubleshooting","category_nicename":"errors","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":43,"name":"Google Search Console Errors","slug":"google-search-console-errors","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":43,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":5,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1953400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1955834,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953400\/revisions\/1955834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1955565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1953400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1953400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1953400"},{"taxonomy":"stellar-product-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.theeventscalendar.com\/knowledgebase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/stellar-product-taxonomy?post=1953400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}