In Google Search Console, I get a 404 for some CMS Collection Pages because these pages are created as Collection Items, but there is no actual layout that is filled with information from an Item.
Creating a layout, as suggested in another thread, for the items doesn’t make sense in our case, since the item typically just contains a photo and a name (e.g. of a team member or a partner) and links to an external page (e.g. LinkedIn or another company’s homepage).
If I select “Exclude these pages from site search results” in the CMS Collection Page settings, it still gets crawled, probably because only the first part of the URL slug is excluded and the item-specific rest is not. I have now added in the tag to the CMS Collection Page, but I assume that the result will remain the same.
I could set up a redirect for the whole pages of course. But since new items without an actual page will be added constantly, that wouldn’t be the smartest option.
Another option would be to create a grid, which is not based on CMS Collections. This would however not be ideal, since using CMS Items is less prone to errors.
So how can I avoid the 404s in the Search Console?
“Exclude these pages from site search results” is for internal search not Google.
Look closely to all site because if pages are indexed in search console it means that somewhere there is a link to it otherwise there is no reason for page to be crawled by bot
Also to be super safe put noindex on the dedicated pages
It sounds as though you want to exclude those pages entirely from publishing, and therefore from Google picking them up for SERPs.
On the Collection Page settings, you’ll find an option at the top that lets you turn off publishing just for those collection pages. Disable that and republish. Then if those pages have already been indexed by Google, use Google Search Console to request removal of those pages.
