I bet that these are either deleted or posted in private forums (that once where public or content was moved to).

dcz wrote:I bet that these are either deleted or posted in private forums (that once where public or content was moved to).

Stephen26 wrote:Thanks for your answer! All redirects for existing sites work, but deleted posts which we have a lot of get a 302-redirect to the correct 404 error pages which have such URLs:http://www.domain.tld/topic1234.html.

Right. Just deleted posts get 302-redirected to example.com/topic1234.html-URLs and then those give out the correct 404 HTTP Header (which I could change to 410). This can or will irritate spiders, At the moment I have a Disallow: /topic*.html in my robots.txt.

At least some good news: You were right, the number of indexed *.php-files has been going down pretty fast (-30k within some days).

What might be the reason that suddenly post-URLs are being indexed (when not blocked via robots.txt) and worse that post-URLs from deleted threads get 302-redirected to 404 error pages (those have URLs like -http://www.example.com/topic123.html)? I really want to fix this (just index, forum and topic-URLs in the index) and not uninstall the SEO mod after a lot of work.

404 header does take more time than 301 to be taken into account, you could 301 redirect un-existing post to index if you prefer. Note that it would be far worst without the USU and the zero dupe.

1)
Thanks for your answer! I could 301 redirect those URLs (-http://www.example.com/topic123.html type) to root. But keep in mind that those URLs are already 302 redirects of deleted post-URLs (-http://www.example.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=345&p=6789 type). So it would be a 302 -> 301 redirect chain. Does that even work? Or will Google just look at the first HTTP Status Code?

2)
Do you have any idea what might cause these 302 redirects of deleted post-URLs? Any guess how I could fix this instead of trying out work-arounds?

If the 302 is the result of a trigger_error call, then, just implement the 301 before and bypass the message.

I'd love to do that, but don't know how?

In viewtopic.php, add :

Code: Select all

// www.phpBB-SEO.com SEO TOOLKIT BEGIN
if (!empty($phpbb_seo->seo_opt['zero_dupe']['on'])) {
        $phpbb_seo->seo_redirect($phpbb_seo->seo_path['phpbb_urlR']);
}
// www.phpBB-SEO.com SEO TOOLKIT END

Before all occurences of :

Code: Select all

trigger_error('NO_TOPIC');

And you'll be set.

++

I'll try that on my test-board within the next hours. Thanks!

When I enter the URL of a deleted post in my browser I get redirected to root, but when I enter it in web-sniffer it still shows a 302-redirect to -http://www.example.com/topic123.html.

Could you PM me a real example ?

Done!

Ok, I see, try to add the same code once more before the first :

Code: Select all

      redirect(append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}viewtopic.$phpEx", "t=$topic_id" . (($forum_id) ? "&f=$forum_id" : '')));

Didn't work, but thanks anyways.

Even if I replace

Code: Select all

trigger_error('NO_TOPIC');

with

Code: Select all

redirect(append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}index.$phpEx"));

for testing purpose the 302-redirect to example.com/topic345.html occurs (web sniffer shows that). This happens just with URLs like this: example.com/viewtopic?f=12&t=345&p=67890 where the Posting p doesn't exist anymore because forum and / or topic got deleted.