Producing too many link events

Can you provide a link to your site for us to check out?

https://www.endtime.com/events/1915-07-11/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1933-03-21/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1967-06-30/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1996-10-05/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1938-09-25/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1992-02-20/
https://www.endtime.com/events/1926-05-22/

Plus as many as 9000 more. It is creating a link for apparently every day back to the early 1900’s! They show up as 404 errors in webmaster tools. help!

Ordinarily we set a “robots” meta tag to instruct search engines not to index pages like that. In your case that would seem to be overridden, whether by your theme or another plugin.

Can you investigate that possibility? An easy test would be deactivating all other plugins and switching to a default theme and confirming if the relevant meta tag in the source reads as:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

(Which is what I’d expect in this situation) or if the content values are something other than noindex,follow (which is unfortunately the case in your situation and is probably due to some code deliberately put in place to achieve some other goal).

My problem is not the fact that Google sees these thousands of links; that is a symptom. The problems is your plugin producing the links. Is there a setting to turn this off or can you fix the plugin?

We cannot turn off all our plugins or the theme. We have thousands of visitors to the site daily and the functions cannot be turned off while live.

Howdy Cfwd,

Our plugin does not produce those links. Rather, it accepts them if a page links to that specific URL, or if a user types it in. That is a perfectly valid URL, what if you did have an event on 1967-06-30?

The trouble is that you do not have a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” /> setup. So each time Google visits a page, it then gets a link to one day in the history (<< Previous events). It goes to that page, sees another link, and visits. Ad infinitum.

You need to fix your meta tags and it will behave proper.

I hope that makes sense.

– Brook

Ok so which page do I set up the no index/no follow meta link? And how through your plugin?

By default our plugin includes that Meta information. It is likely that one of your other plugins is somehow overriding the meta tag. You can probably find out which plugin by first disabling any SEO plugins, if you now see the noindex meta tag in your page’s source code then that plugin is messing things up. You would have to consult with that plugin’s dev or documentation to find a fix, or just permanently disable it. If it was not an SEO plugin, try disabling any other plugins other than Tribe ones and rechecking those pages source code for the meta tag (you might try Ctrl + f). If it persists, it could even be your theme that is remove the meta tag. Hopefully one of these steps will eventually help you find what plugin/bit of code is conflicting then you can adjust it to fix things, or just leave that plugin disabled.

– Brook

It’s been a month, so in accordance with our forum guidelines I’m shutting this thread. Thanks for your support!
~Leah