Google indexed weird urls

  • Resolved Process of Illumination

    (@process_of_illumination)


    6 years, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    I asked the same question on the bbpress section of this support: please allow me to ask about my problem here as well since, maybe, the problem is related to TSF.

    My 2.5.14 BBpress installation is running on WP 4.9.5.

    I’ve noticed Google indexed urls with “?id=” and “&page” and I really have no idea how this happened.

    I managed to add a noindex metatag to them by editing functions.php but this is only a partial solution, since the pages continue to exist and the spider crawls them anyway. Furthermore, I read on different SEO forums that link juice is wasted by noindexed pages.

    The problem seems to occur only with paginated content. Some examples:

    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion&page=15
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion&page=2
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion&page=3
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion&page=4
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/8?id=myquestion&page=9
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion&page=11
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion&page=15
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion&page=2
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion&page=4
    • mysite.com/forum/topic/myquestion/page/9?id=myquestion&page=9

    I searched for “&page” in all the Forum’s files and found it on “generate-url.class.php”. Do you think these urls come from there?

    Do you have any idea in order to prevent their creation?

    Thank you VERY much for any advice!

    The Process

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi ??

    I’ve noticed Google indexed urls with “?id=” and “&page” and I really have no idea how this happened.

    Why do you thing it is bad? It is only URL and Google doesn’t really care about the URL format.

    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Hi guys,

    Google doesn’t care about the URL format indeed, and these URLs are being found throughout the forum pages as “quick” hyperlinks.

    bbPress caused a lot of issues for us because it runs its own API for the URL structure.
    So, we’ve disabled canonical URL support for bbPress, and bbPress claimed to handle this itself.

    Nevertheless, you can solve this outside of the WordPress realm.
    I don’t recommend fiddling with the robots.txt file as that requires maintenance.

    You can tell Google to ignore those URLs in Search Console:
    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080551?hl=en

    Bing has a similar feature:
    https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/ignore-url-parameters-d7496c65

    Cheers ??

    Thread Starter Process of Illumination

    (@process_of_illumination)

    Hi,

    I agree Google doesn’t care about url format, but it DOES care about duplicate content. All these pages provide the same content, and this is a problem.

    Thank you,

    The Process.

    This would mean ALL forums on the planet are duplicate content, no? I personally think you are reading too much into this and you have heaps of stuff that are more important in terms of SEO you can focus on. My 2 cents ??

    On the top of that, this is more of a BBpress territory, since this plugins is handling URLs.

    Lastly, forums and community software is not really geared towards SEO, it is primary tool for curated conversation online. Like I said, if you care about SEO, you might consider focusing more on other aspects.

    Thread Starter Process of Illumination

    (@process_of_illumination)

    No, Pierre, I’ll explain better.

    I have indexed:

    https://www.forum.com/topic
    https://www.forum.com/topic?id=topic
    https://www.forum.com/topic?id=topic&page1
    https://www.forum.com/topic?id=topic&page4

    They all have exactly the same content, and I dont want 4 (or more) pages with the same content indexed by google.

    Unfortunately canonical urls provided by bbpress don’t seem to work.

    The heaps of more important stuff are off topic here.

    The Process

    If those pages are 100% identical it is indeed an issue (Albeit I think this will not impact your SEO results noticeably, maybe not at all because Google is smart about handling these). However, isn’t this more in control of BBpress than anything else? After all BBpress makes those URLs ??

    @cybr offered you some tips how to solve this outside of WordPress, if you want to stick with BBpress you should look at those.

    I would go as far as saying, consider using something else. I am big fan of both Flarum and Discourse. I never really focused on SEO here, but when it comes to curating discussion they are in my opinion light years ahead of BBpress.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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