sale items - confused

[keat]

I have webmaster tools telling me that a page doesn't exist, and that i'm not displaying a 404.

However, when I follow the suggested link it takes me to a "Sale Items" page, that has no products.

And rightly so, doesn't exist, but it yet when i follow it, it does.

I'm confused.

 

Where is this URL being generated, and considering I have sale items, should these not be on the URL

https://www.cabletiesonline.co.uk/sale-items.html?page=6&cat_id=sale

[bsmither]

"When you follow it"? I don't understand that sentence.

The URL given is correct, however, the page=6 may not actually be valid. If you have enough items on sale to fill five pages, then whatever is calculating the pagination is at fault for believing there are enough items to fill six pages.

So, making a page request for the sixth page of items may return a valid page (header, footer, sideboxes, etc), but the message "No products exist." may be shown.

[keat]

I didn't realise 6 was a page number, (I assumed it was maybe a category_id)

Manually changing the URL to "page=1", reveals a small number of sale items. (we only have a few)

Page=2 etc reveals "No Products Found"

 

I guess therefore that Google webmaster tools must have indexed page 6, when we had a sale on or something, when page 6 was populated.

 

This now begs the question, why is there an invisble page 6 with no items on it and no 404 ?

And why do I not have a link to "Sale Items"

[bsmither]

CubeCart is not (yet) coded to explain the results to someone who seems to have manually written a URL (or found an obsolete URL somewhere else) to include a page number that does not appear in the pagination sequence.

Foundation has a [More...] button at the bottom, but other skins could have a pagination sequence:

1 2 3 [4] 5 6 > >>

CubeCart creates the pagination sequence based on the total number of items available. Thus, the sequence should never show a page number higher than the amount of populated pages.

As you surmise, I think this isn't a case of an existing link for an "invisible page 6", but rather an obsolete link found somewhere other than your store.

It would be nice to have code to catch this situation, such as returning the last available page regardless of how high the (invalid) page number goes.

You should have a link to Sale Items if there are items for sale. Maybe a template was edited?

Edited September 28, 2017 by bsmither