Yoast-ga/outbound-article not found errors

I have exactly the same problem…and have gone form 34 errors to 14,675 in three days – all with the yoast-ga/outbound-article/
Have had a look at Yoast WP plugin with no luck so far

@sahar.seo

Can you post here the error message?

yoast-ga/outbound-article/https://maps.google.com

In Yoast Google Analytic’s plugin:

Uncheck: “Track outbound clicks & downloads”

That should do it…

Umm no. That’s not a solution. I want to track outbound clicks; I don’t want it generating false URLS. I have six sites configured exactly the same, and it’s not happening on all of them, moreover, I’ve been running this plugin for years and it only just started behaving this way.

Agreed; I’d like to track outbound clicks without having false URLs. Any advice? Thanks!

The solution is very simple. Create a robots.txt file and place it at the root of your web site (e.g. mysite.com/robots.txt) and put in the following disallow statement to prevent this path from being spidered:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /yoast-ga/

This allows you to continue tracking those external links and prevents the 404s you’re seeing in Google Webmaster Tools. Need more info about robots.txt? https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html