Mini Mods - HTTP Error Response Codes by BOP5 (Soft 404 Solution)

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com

This issue was brought to my attention by Sherrie at TAZ in this thread.

The issue is that when Google crawls a site and runs into the vBulletin No Permission message or other standard vBulletin error pages vBulletin gives the standard "200" HTTP response code which means everything is OK, even though there is no real content on these pages. Therefore Google considers these "soft errors" and they can damage overall SEO of your site if there are too many of them.

What this does is make vBulletin return standard HTTP "Error" responses- by default 403 (Not Authorized) for No Permission pages and 404 (Not Found) for general error messages. When Google sees these responses (as opposed to 200) it knows not to bother indexing the page and everyone is happy.

As of version 2.2 new options have been added to return custom response codes when the forum is closed or when the forum is busy. It will also send a retry header telling the crawler they can try again later. As of version 2.0 there is also a separate response code for search.php errors.

A limitation of this mod is it works best with PHP 5.4.0 or higher. As of version 2.0 If you are on an older version of PHP it may not work, but it should not cause any errors, so it is worth trying.

There are no instructions, once installed it is enabled by default. In Admin CP -> Settings -> Options -> HTTP Error Responses by BOP5 you can enable/disable the mod and choose the response codes you want for the different error types. You can use any standard HTTP response code available from this list at wikipedia.

The mod works fine on VB 3.x or 4.x including VB 3.8.8 (still in Beta) and VB 4.2.2.

To test that it is working use a free online status checker such as: http://httpstatus.io/
(Note the site will cache your result for a while so test with a unique URL each time.)

Before you install the mod any URL that will show a no-permission or other vBulletin error will show a status code of 200. After installing the same page will show a 403, 404, or other code that you have configured.

Added Boothby as a "co-author" as thanks for his contribution of code and ideas. :up:

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[BirdOPrey5]

Reserved.

[DemOnstar]

Good lad BOP5, on the ball as ever....

[Justinphx]

Excellent. Thanks and works like a charm.

[EddieDean]

This so sad. Today I was looking to solve those error and find your thread, but my forum is in Banahosting and the PHP version on the server is 5.3.28... There is a way I can solve this without migrate to other hosting?

[ozzy47]

See if your host will update the PHP, if not then you would need to either find a different host, or not use this particular mod.

[BirdOPrey5]

Originally Posted by EddieDean

This so sad. Today I was looking to solve those error and find your thread, but my forum is in Banahosting and the PHP version on the server is 5.3.28... There is a way I can solve this without migrate to other hosting?

Sorry, been looking for ways to do it in older PHP versions but the only work-around uses the header() function, the problem is that function must be called before any output is created by the script and the hooks for the error messages aren't called until after script produces some output- so the header function calls are basically ignored. I'm not seeing any alternatives.

[Thangvip9x]

I am using vbulletin 4.2.2 but version PHP 5.3, i very want use this mod, you can modify this product

[ozzy47]

That was answered in the post above yours.

[ramesh_umk3]

So if i want to use this i have to spare my VBSEO right ?