200+ Errrors

Thanks @jdembowski for always being on top of every conversation, your dedication on those forums are highly appreciated by our Events Calendar team!

@chapelger thank you for sharing the screenshot showing your Google Search Console; that helps a lot to understand your scenario!

As the SEO specialist in the house, now I can answer that properly!

Note that you’re checking the “Blocked by robots.txt” warnings. That message means that your website’s robots.txt file is blocking Googlebot from crawling the page. In other words, Google is trying to access the URL but is being prevented by the robots.txt file. So Google is just doing what your site is asking them to.

If you check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt, you’ll note that there’s one specific line asking to block all URLs containing an “?” on it:

Disallow: /*?

And your report shows URLs with parameters (so having the ? on it) listed there, so Google is correct in blocking them as your site is asking for that!

Also, note that blocking the ?tribe-bar-date= is not an error and will not cause any issues on your search engine results, as the plugin already provide plain URLs to show that same content.

For example, the event you see at /events/list/?tribe-bar-date=2023-08-27 (and that parameter is only used when selecting a date using the date picker) is the same event you’ll find at /events/2023-08-27/ (the day view URL), and there’s no need to have multiple URLs showing the exact same content being indexed by Google.

So, what you think is an error, in fact, benefits your site as Google will not need to decide which URLs should be indexed or not, improving the crawler efficiency. Google is just informing you that the URL containing ?tribe-bar-date is not being indexed, but not saying that this is a mistake or a bad thing!

We’re constantly improving the SEO aspects of our plugins, and we appreciate your preoccupation with how the plugin works and affects your website performance on the search engine results; That is a topic that I also love ❤️, and I’m always talking with our developers, support team and customers about that, devoting some time to check every SEO requests we receive, analyze them, and provide the best answers to our customers and the best reports our developers can receive to improve our plugins.

That said, I can end that long message saying that there’s nothing to worry about; you’ll see those warnings on the Blocked by Robots.txt area but, when talking about what our plugin does and the URLs I can see on your report, that’s a good thing! (and warnings ⚠️ are not errors 🚨)

If you want to take the best results using the robots.txt file, I suggest checking that article at https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/k/seo-and-performance-issues/. There’s a suggested robots.txt file there, and I constantly revise that part 🙂

Best regards!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Guga Alves.