Equal Symbol Appended to URL

[Bestrafung]

For some reason when some links are clicked, especially from external sites or search results, an equal symbol will be appended to the URL. If you do a google search for our site about 90% of the links have the equal symbol appended and are broken.

Before we started using an SEO plugin this would cause the visitor to be redirected to the main page and contributed to a large bounce rate. Now after the SEO plugin it gives a page not found error. I have removed the plugin and am no longer using it. I need to redirect it's broken URLs back to the vb default.

I've tried several rewrite and redirect rules in .htaccess with no luck. I need to be able to remove the equal symbol from the end of the URL, any URL. I saw someone else posted this exact issue in 2015 and I checked their site and they still have the issue. I'd really appreciate any assistance with this.

Example Bad URL:

https://subdomain.example.com/content/?123-Article-Title=

[KOM]

Can we get a reply to this? What is happening is, google has some of our pages with = at the end of the link. when people click on that. they just get dumped on our index page. Our bounce rate is really going up and I just can't figure this one out?
https://members.gunnook.com/content/...V-FFL-Dealers=

Exp.

Please any help would be much appreciated

[snakes1100]

Id suggest checking your installed hacks/addons, as the urls are correct on the site.

Regenerate a sitemap after disabling all your addons, verify the urls are correct in the sitemap afterwards.

[KOM]

Originally Posted by snakes1100

Id suggest checking your installed hacks/addons, as the urls are correct on the site.

Regenerate a sitemap after disabling all your addons, verify the urls are correct in the sitemap afterwards.

I'll give it a shot, Thanks

[Bestrafung]

Originally Posted by snakes1100

Id suggest checking your installed hacks/addons, as the urls are correct on the site.

Regenerate a sitemap after disabling all your addons, verify the urls are correct in the sitemap afterwards.

Thanks for the suggestions. I already did this several days ago. Unfortunately, Google hasn't finished indexing the sitemap and still has a lot of the old broken URLs. I am slowly working on rewriting the URLs back to normal. The equal symbol being appended to the URL seems to be a bug that affects any vBulletin site as far as I can tell. If I can just find a way, either through a php edit or an .htaccess rule, to remove the trailing equal symbol everything should start working again.

[snakes1100]

Well, i dont see a report on such a bug, nor have i seen it on any of the sites that i run.

Also, im not sure you'll be able to fix that with a rewrite, as the url is rewritten & has a few issues including the double ?? mark & removal of the /.

[KOM]

Yeah, I'm not sure how to fix it. I do believe we got the ?? out but the = will not go away. I think all this happened when we added the SEO. We reached out to try and get some help but he just said the issues was not created by the SEO. Since then I've removed it but no luck. I've been a user / member of this community for a very long and I have no idea how to fix this!

[snakes1100]

As the original link you posted for wv ffl dealers showed the =, i googled & checked thesame link & cant produce the issue

https://www.google.com/search?ei=r1n....0.xrdL_cLmyNk

[TheLastSuperman]

This could be due to .htaccess and/or any type of SEO mod you have installed. You can actually remove words or characters via htaccess see the bottom example here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-word-from-url

The only time this won't work is for example, if:
- You have vBSEO (which you shoudn't even be using by the way, insecure and unsafe!) OR DBSEO installed because it's handled differently if you use those i.e. you should use the custom rewrite rules within the software and not edit htaccess directly.

Edit: The = is being appended to the url somehow, I would instead of trying to "band-aid" this per say, find the actual culprit and fix it properly (possibly: Something within htaccess, something within settings like CMS url or such, if you have vb/DBSEO installed check it's settings etc, any file edits done check timestamps on that and/or run Suspect Files from AdminCP Maintenance section to compare files if original contents or not).