I keep getting this error appearing in my GSC soft 404 errors. Does this need to be indexed? Can I change robots.txt to tell google to not index it?
Last crawled: 8/20/18
First detected: 3/11/18
The target URL doesn't exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error. Learn more
Your server returns a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404). This creates a poor experience for searchers and search engines.
The link itself displays this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /home/interes6/public_html/wp-content/themes/Newspaper/index.php:6 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in /home/interes6/public_html/wp-content/themes/Newspaper/index.php on line 6
What is the best way to resolve this? thanks
this is a common error when installing or updating a theme; stupidly WP uses ‘index.php’ as a default template file, vs ‘default.php’ and so at some point Google or a hacker will try to index that location when something else is not loading inside the folder due to the way WP works with the htaccess writing. If you get an error going to that page, that is normal, as it should NOT load in the browser.
If you get the errors all the time, something may be wrong. If you get “1” error once in a while. Just mark as fixed and move on.
Google should also be smart enough to not try to load index.php files inside of a folder called /wp-content/themes/foo/index.php
which only shows how “out of touch with reality” that testing and system check tool really is. However, again, this only happens sometimes when something is being updated.
Using a “maintenance mode” plugin can help with this when doing any kind of WP or system updates.
LOL. great. thanks
