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  • September 17, 2024 at 6:58 am #1467175
    Annedesign

    Hi,

    This note from my marketing colleague:
    in our client sites that we manage we are noticing some Enfold entries in their Google Search Console. Most entries are related to (1) soft 404s and (2) canonical issues. There are a number of entries like this across many of our other clients’ sites, all using Enfold. Please see the screen shot linked here with 1x example. https://paste.pics/f1541bffbf80fd217b530b3832afe6ae

    Can you please advise if there is a solution for Google to not to report these, so that it behaves similar to other sites that we manage which are not on Enfold.

    Additional information for you to be aware of, is that all our websites are hosted by the same provider on servers with the exact same sever configuration.

    Thanks – we look forward to hearing from you.

    September 18, 2024 at 4:54 am #1467258
    Ismael

    Hey Anne,

    Thank you for the inquiry.

    Can you give an example of a page returning a soft 404? According to the documentation (https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s), you can follow these steps.

    1.) Check whether you have soft 404 errors listed in Webmaster Tools
    2.) For the soft 404 errors, determine whether the URL:
    — Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
    — Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
    — Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
    3.) Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
    4.) If you now return 404 errors, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.

    And for canonical issues, consider using SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math.

    // https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-yoast-seo/

    Best regards,
    Ismael

    September 18, 2024 at 4:57 am #1467260
    Annedesign

    Thanks Ismael,
    I will pass this on and let you know if any other questions,
    Anne

    September 19, 2024 at 3:52 am #1467405
    Annedesign

    Hi,
    I have a reply from my colleague – i hope I am explaining this correctly:
    Is it possible for you tell us why the files and folders for Enfold, which are from the WordPress Admin side, are being picked up by Google and its crawlers? Files served within the administration area including WordPress themes folder should never be crawled and indexed. You can refer to the image that was attached initially.

    Thanks, Anne

    September 20, 2024 at 4:43 am #1467497
    Ismael

    Hi,

    Is it possible for you tell us why the files and folders for Enfold, which are from the WordPress Admin side, are being picked up by Google and its crawlers?

    This should be controlled server-side, either via server directives (.htaccess) or the robots.txt file. Please check the links below for more info.

    // https://yoast.com/help/how-to-edit-robots-txt-through-yoast-seo/

    Example of robot.txt content:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

    Best regards,
    Ismael

    September 20, 2024 at 4:59 am #1467502
    Annedesign

    Thank you – i’ll get them to check.

    Anne

    September 20, 2024 at 5:09 am #1467506
    Ismael

    Hi,

    No problem. We’ll keep the thread open.

    Best regards,
    Ismael

    September 20, 2024 at 5:16 am #1467510
    Annedesign

    This has come back from our developer for me to ask you (sorry, its not an area I understand. so relaying the info):

    “Thank you for your reply to adding in server directives. We can do this however we would like to add that we are at a loss on this. Because we work with Enfold and several other themes, including page builders we find we don’t need to add any server directives. These other themes and page builders don’t specify them either and their GSC accounts are clean of any paths related to WP Admin area and Theme paths.
    So, I am quite confused why we would need to do this step specifically for Enfold?”

    September 20, 2024 at 5:23 am #1467513
    Ismael

    Hi,

    It’s possible that the servers where the other sites are hosted already have this directive in place, possibly because they are WordPress-managed sites or for other reasons. Either way, you can prevent crawlers from indexing unnecessary files by using the robots.txt file. Please note that it may take some time for the search results to be updated.

    Best regards,
    Ismael

    September 20, 2024 at 5:29 am #1467514
    Annedesign

    Hi, I know the sites are all on the same server manages by our developer – he was wondering why only the Enfold sites had this behaviour. I will pass on your reply,

    Thanks, Anne

    September 23, 2024 at 6:37 am #1467642
    Annedesign

    Did you have any other thoughts on why only our Enfold sites have this behaviour?
    Anne

    September 25, 2024 at 7:15 am #1467784
    Ismael

    Hi,

    We don’t encounter a lot of threads about this, and when we do, it’s usually related to the server configuration. Configuring the robots.txt file or adding directives to the server usually takes care of the issue.

    Best regards,
    Ismael

    September 25, 2024 at 8:03 am #1467786
    Annedesign

    Thank you, I appreciate you looking into this for us.
    You can mark the topic closed.
    Anne

    September 25, 2024 at 10:49 am #1467798
    Rikard

    Hi,

    Thanks for the update, we’ll close this thread for now then. Please open a new thread if you should have any further questions or problems.

    Best regards,
    Rikard

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