After looking through which template was returning the 404 error

STANDARD_ERROR

I replaced the 404 Not Found text to read 403 Forbidden

I checked that a genuine 404 page still came up as such so I know it hasn't affected that.

Not ideal but will see what results webmaster crawl errors comes back with over the next couple of weeks and let you know.

I think there may be some confusion... Standard Error doesn't return a 404 error... If it did this mod wouldn't be necessary- the response code on standard error is 200 (OK) regardless of the actual text displayed in the browser- the text in the browser doesn't determine the response code Google gets. The response code isn't a visible element.

Am I right you have VBSEO installed? I don't think there is any other means vBulletin would display a 404 error message?

Thank you :)

Perfect Mod, should be standard built into vbulletin!!

Mick

Awesome

it works without any issue on 4.2.2 PL1 - Vbseo installed.

First error number was 200
after installing this, it is 403

thanks BirdOPrey5

Hi and thanks for this!

In my webmasters tools I get a load of errors like this all related to tags

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/04/15.jpg

Shouldn't this modification fix this with the 403 no permission message?

Crawlers are getting to these pages (Tags) and because I don't allow guests to use the search function they are getting these type of errors and marking it as a soft 404.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/04/16.jpg

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/04/17.jpg

Any idea TIA. :cool:

I can confirm http://www.techkings.org/tags/worked.html is now getting a REAL 404 response code. So those soft errors should go away soon.

These are errors I am still getting after installing this modification.

I cleared all the errors in webmasters tools (and I had loads) and these tag errors have come back after installing this, see the "detected dates" above in the image :up:

if you put any of your "tag" URLs into this site- http://httpstatus.io - it confirms a 404 is being returned. It isn't 403 because by default the mod sends 403 for "No Permission" errors only and 404 for all others.

The dates on the image are all several or more days ago so I assume you won't see any more past today assuming the mod remains active.

However it is pretty clear you should add your entire /tags/ path to your robots.txt file, that would be the right way to prevent the crawl issues.

installed and result is great. check soft.png (attached)

just one question , after installing this Access Denied urls increased (access.png) . All these urls are for the threads which has been moved to Trash and those redirect to Trashcan url. is it ok or bad for SEO?

From what I've read (I'm not claiming to be an expert) a 403/404 won't hurt overall SEO although the actual page causing the error will eventually be de-indexed. (Which is exactly what we want to happen.)