vBulletin.org SEO

[hilaryl]

Hi,

I just have a question about the vbulletin.org site, and it's SEO.

In particular I am interested in how you deal with pages that require a user to be logged in to see content.

An example URL being this - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=152301&d=1429493282

If you are not logged in, it's a page that asks you to log in. However, the HTTP response is a 200 OK. From what I am experiencing in my own Webmaster Tools, I would say that this is being marked as a 'soft 404' in your Webmaster Tools. And given how big the vbulletin.org site is, I would imagine you would have thousands of 'soft 404' errors from pages like this.

Can you confirm any of that?

Obviously this mustn't effect you SEO wise that much because you do very well in Google.

Google has recently started finding threads on our forum that require a log in, still not sure how because we don't link to them, but I'm not sure if I need to take any measures to stop it from impacting us SEO wise.

Cheers,
hilaryl

[BirdOPrey5]

The truth is it doesn't make much difference... but on the other hand vBulletin.org doesn't have much competiton on the topic of free vBulletin modifications.

However if you are concerned about soft 404 errors check out this mod I created that addresses that issue- https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=309415

[hilaryl]

Hi BOP5,

I have seen your mod - and I am most likely going to install it.

The issue I'm facing at the moment is I am not sure how Google is finding these URL's, and by installing the mod I'm not really fixing the issue, just changing the errors from soft 404 to access denied in Webmaster Tools. From what I understand it's better to have 403 then soft 404 - but in the long run, I'm not sure if I need to worry about it.

Ideally I'd like to find out how Google bot could find these 'hidden' URL's to stop the issue at it's source.

Thanks for your feedback.

Cheers

[BirdOPrey5]

An example URL being this - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=152301&d=1429493282


This looks like an IE Error message- can you paste an example URL into the post using the [CODE] BBCode?

[hilaryl]

Yeah - if you are logged into vBulletin.org

If you are not logged in, you won't be able to see the attachment, and it will ask you to log in.