Google crawlers are going to domain/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/ directly and generate an error 500. In the server logs, the following log can be found:
[Wed Sep 06 22:30:08.070258 2017] [php7:error] [pid 22258] [client redacted:62857] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /redacted/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/index.php:6\nStack trace:\n#0 {main}\n thrown in /redacted/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/index.php on line 6, referer: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-errors?hl=en&siteUrl=redacted
Can this issue be fixed since it might negatively impact SEO when crawling errors occur, or is this nothing to worry about?
This happens when you update theme or main WordPress …
nothing to fix; normally you will have one of these, unless hacker slamming that directory. So, with one you just mark as ‘fixed’ and move on.
That should so be in the WP documentation — which they are finally going to redo (won’t be called ‘codex’ any more for 2018!). 🙂
Thanks again Chris! Have a great day.
I think we did something on one site for that,
we made an index.php file that had a refresh header …
although I think we then instead did an htaccess file for the them folder,
and did 301 redirect for index.php to home page of site. Something like that.
Downside is you need to replace those each time theme is updated.
Or, just grimace when you do theme update and month later see that single entry in your search console. I usually just go “(sigh) … stupid Google…”
I mean, how stupid do you have to be in the data mining business to not auto-ignore /wp-content/themes/ for indexing ANYTHING? Duh.
