XF 1.5 Tags and Google analytics giving soft 404

[Robf23]

I'm getting lots of soft 404's in my google search console. All the URLs are /tags/ urls which as a member I can see. However google's bots can't and see a soft 404. (I can see this in the google fetch and preview).

Can anyone advise on how to prevent this? I have the default xenforo robots.txt which doesn't disallow the /tags/

thanks in advance

 

[Robf23]

anyone?

 

[Robf23]

Search was disabled for guests. Putting that back on solved it.

 

[Robf23]

Hmm, now it's back again.

 

[snoopy5]

Same problem here.

I have got an email from google:

New Index coverage issue detected for site ww.mysitedomain.com

To owner of site ww.mysitedomain.com,
Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 new Index coverage related issue. This means that Index coverage may be negatively affected in Google Search results. We encourage you to fix this issue.

New issue found:
Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404

In Google search I can see this



Any idea what the problem is?

 

[Robf23]

I believe it's tags on images. By default these are blocked from guests on my site so google cannot see them. There's no way around it unfortunately if you want guests not to see your images.

 

[Live Free]

I'm also experiencing this issue, did you guys ever find a fix?

In my case these are tags applied to threads in user-only forums. Examining Search Console says the page is listed in the sitemap, but here it seems content hidden from guests shouldn't appear in the sitemap. @Chris D would you mind weighing in?

In Search Console these changes appeared suddenly, I got 1500+ soft 404s for tag pages overnight in the situation I described above.

 

[Chris D]

If the tags related to the soft 404 do not have any visible results to guests then this is basically expected.

A soft 404 just indicates a page like this which doesn’t return any results, but doesn’t return a 404 code.

Returning a 404 code is not appropriate if the tag does actually exist in the database.

Overall, the soft 404s are basically informational and nothing to worry about.

 

[Live Free]

The increase in corresponde to an increase in logged unindexed content, including valid public viewable threads, which is my concern.

Was their a console update around the end of July/beginning of August that would explain why these errors showed then, and not before?

Is it possible to hide Member only Tags from the Tag Page /Tag cloud / public with conditional statements?

 

[leslie dow]

Was there any update on this? I am now getting this reported on my google search console with the information that if not resolved will impact my my site's ranking on google search.
Here is the information on why google considers this an issue:

HTTP Status Codes, Network and DNS Errors, and Google Search | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

See how different HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors can affect Google Search. Learn how to debug network and DNS errors.

support.google.com

 

[V3NTUS]

Was there any update on this? I am now getting this reported on my google search console with the information that if not resolved will impact my my site's ranking on google search.
Here is the information on why google considers this an issue:

HTTP Status Codes, Network and DNS Errors, and Google Search | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

See how different HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors can affect Google Search. Learn how to debug network and DNS errors.

support.google.com

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