V4 - huge amounts of SEO errors... Old lofi links

[Guest]

Hello,

Can anyone help with .htaccess / mod_rewrite? I've upgraded from v2 to v4 and now all the old Google links are coming up in error. It's trying to load lofi links such as /lofiversion/index.php?t13990.html when it needs to follow the new format. I am using the semi-friendly urls. Anyone have the rewrite to hand?

[tnn]

42 minutes ago, SiDHEaD said:

Hello,

Can anyone help with .htaccess / mod_rewrite? I've upgraded from v2 to v4 and now all the old Google links are coming up in error. It's trying to load lofi links such as /lofiversion/index.php?t13990.html when it needs to follow the new format. I am using the semi-friendly urls. Anyone have the rewrite to hand?

Hopefully for starters, you took out the old rules for v2 in your .htaccess?

[Guest]

45 minutes ago, tnn said:

Hopefully for starters, you took out the old rules for v2 in your .htaccess?

Hello,

I didn't have a .htaccess until I made it earlier on today.

[tnn]

I'm hoping someone chimes in...

Mine was a litle different when I converted and this is what I have:

# Htaccess Redirects old forum to new IPB 4 update
RewriteRule ^index.php/topic/(.*)$ /topic/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^index.php/forum/(.*)$ /forum/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

(Okay, I see that you are going from v2 to 4, I went from 3 to 4 that's why my brain was short circuiting)

Your situation is different and I think you are safer off redirecting to your home page. Here is an .htaccess generator -> http://www.webconfs.com/htaccess-redirect-generator.php

You might use the "Redirect old directory to new directory", Which is loftversion to home page. 

[Guest]

Hello,

Well I started off doing the directory redirect before I posted here - the problem is the topic number on the end. I need to somehow get that out and use it in the destination. I've seen this done before somehow.

[tnn]

1 hour ago, SiDHEaD said:

Hello,

Well I started off doing the directory redirect before I posted here - the problem is the topic number on the end. I need to somehow get that out and use it in the destination. I've seen this done before somehow.

Okay, by the way this works to send to the home page -> rewriterule ^loftversion/(.*)$ http://MY.DOMAIN/$1 [r=301,nc]

I think where you might have seen it is from version 3 to 4? You are talking about redirecting " ?t13990.html " to its v4 topic and I can't see where there would be a pattern match to do that. So for v3 to 4 I had RewriteRule ^index.php/topic/(.*)$ /topic/$1 [R=301,NC,L] and it took care of it. But ?t13990.html does not have the same pattern that I can see. Again, hopefully someone chimes in. However, you do want those valuable 404s at least going to your home page where the person can regroup and get to their destination.

 

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Sorry if I was ambiguous.. I put a htaccess in to catch people to go to home page rather than 404, but i really wanted google to still go to the correct topic as i'm getting 100,000x error messages logged in Webmaster Tools and I'm sure it will be hurting the site standings.

Yeah your disection of the issue is spot on - just need someone who can help with how to use that topic number var in the new url.

[Guest]

Boo, need to find a way to sort this, Google has been hitting me hard since I turned on HTTPS mode. Mainly because one of the javascripts seems to insist on trying to load as HTTP but also because a load of the links coming from Google are not hitting the page that was previously indexed due to the stuff above. Adding the htaccess to make it go to the homepage seems to have made matters worse, as the graph below shows - after I implemented it on Thursday.

[tnn]

@SiDHEaD , are you in Google Webmasters or is that google analytics?

[Guest]

Just now, tnn said:

@SiDHEaD , are you in Google Webmasters or is that google analytics?

Hello,

That extract is from Cloudflare, but the errors (400+ in the last few days) with the links I am seeing are on Google Webmaster tools

[tnn]

Okay,

For starters, making it link to the home page will not make it any worse. A 404 is a 404. I got confused because I then thought that I originally answered the wrong question. 

In Google webmasters, you want to look at Crawl Errors-> Not found and then click on any of those links. The three very important items will be tabbed... 

1. the bad url

From the bad url, you can determine if you can do a pattern match to redirect as you mentioned. (I think there are some experts out there, I am not one of them.) 

2. sitemap information

For the sitemap you want to see if you have any errors. I did when I originally upgraded.

3. where it is linked from

3. Most likely you will have urls (especially old ones) that are linked externally from other websites. Those will create 404 errors as long as they are linked externally. (Even Google says so but I don't want to look up the reference ) . The recommendation is that you:

a) contact those website and let them know of the new location (I don't do that)

b) create a 301 redirect for the important urls (I've done some)

c) do a rewrite rule (I've done those too)

I don't think Cloudflare is part of the equation (I have an account with them but for another project not my forum) 

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your help. I'll check where you said and see if there's any other links coming in.

I'll try and do some reading up again on the rewrites - was hoping someone else had already gone through the pain!

[tnn]

1 minute ago, SiDHEaD said:

Thanks for your help. I'll check where you said and see if there's any other links coming in.

I'll try and do some reading up again on the rewrites - was hoping someone else had already gone through the pain!

No problem, good luck.

And so just in case, the redirect I mentioned in b) is something like:

# Redirect Old Stuff
Redirect 301 /loftversion-1.php http://www.badcompany.com/new-topic/

But that is intensive. 

And I believe you are looking for a rewrite guru who knows how to pattern match that loftversion thingy so fingers crossed. 

[Guest]

Yeah that's exactly it Come on gurus

[Mopar1973Man]

I did just like TNN mention above just do a general redirect and allowed the 404's to flow. Being my domain has nearly 10 years of age Google is picking up very rapidly and down time seems to be rather minimal. Like in my case I moved from Joomla 3.4.x to IP.Pages and also change the structure and placement of all the content so even if I could patterm match it was worthless being the new side was completely altered.

Now if your a really new site I would go through the task of redirecting. As for me over 90,000 URL all 404'ed and Google roughly about 30 days later is picking up the slack now and bring the URLs from the IP.pages now.

[Guest]

30k topics, 1.3m posts, manual not an option hehe

[Guest]

So I've made this, which seems to be helping with the majority of issues:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^lofiversion/index.php/t(\d+).html$ /index.php?showtopic=$1 [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/lofiversion/index.php$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} f(\d+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /index.php?showforum=%1 [NC,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/lofiversion/index.php$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} t(\d+)-(\d+).html$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /index.php?showtopic=%1&start=%2&st=%2 [NC,L]

Also had to change something in the robots.txt to change the blocking on /cache/ to /cache/*.php - as it was blocking a lang javascript file and making Google cry.