480k Pages excluded from google due to redirects

[Steve Bullman]

Hoping to get some advice on this one.  

I have been digging around in google as my traffic has been dropping off for a long time, which I mostly put down to google.  but it looks like I have a massive 480k pages being excluded from google due to redirects.

I moved to to IPS in July last year and the redirects seem to all have worked so im not sure where the problem lies.  I have also clicked some of the URL's that have been redirected assuming they were old, but they include recent topics started as little as a week ago.

Desperately need to get to the bottom of this

 

[bfarber]

Are you certain those pages aren't, in fact, redirected? For instance, with or without www. at the beginning of the URL or http vs https?

[Steve Bullman]

i've had a support ticket with yourselves regarding this, trying to get to the bottom of it, and yes that was my misunderstanding.  Trying to account for the drops in traffic I am having in google and webmaster tools are quite complicated!

[opentype]

The new Search Console helps to “get to the bottom of it” by telling you why the pages get excluded. “Redirect” is a perfectly valid reason. Just click on the entry and it will give you URL examples. In my case, most of it is stuff like ?do=getLastComment. That should no be indexed by itself. So Google is doing its job correctly and there is nothing wrong with the site from the admin’s perspective. 

[CheersnGears]

5 hours ago, Steve Bullman said:

i've had a support ticket with yourselves regarding this, trying to get to the bottom of it, and yes that was my misunderstanding.  Trying to account for the drops in traffic I am having in google and webmaster tools are quite complicated!

I found quite similar numbers to you for the Redirect entry.  Looking into it, it was just GoogleBot trying to log-in or report content hundreds of thousands of times.

[Steve Bullman]

On 4/13/2018 at 11:23 PM, CheersnGears said:

I found quite similar numbers to you for the Redirect entry.  Looking into it, it was just GoogleBot trying to log-in or report content hundreds of thousands of times.

The whole things pretty confusing to me.

 

Heres another thing I don't understand.  I have a lot of access denied URLs which I am going through and checking.

Heres one example... https://arbtalk.co.uk/forums/topic/93219-grass-box-sentinel-murray/?do=ignore&csrfKey=91b2d663abb9817f149e3cc849c2d70a

what does the ?do=ignore&csrfKey=91b2d663abb9817f149e3cc849c2d70a on the end mean?  The thread is in a publicly viewable forum, no reason why it shouldnt be read.  If I delete the extension the thread loads just fine.

 

Can anyone explain that for me please?

I look to have about 60,000 of these with the similar do=ignore extension

[opentype]

3 hours ago, Steve Bullman said:

Can anyone explain that for me please?

It’s the “Ignore this topic” button. It’s member-based and contains a protection key. So Google sees it, but it is not allowed to see the actual page it links to. 

It would be better to hide that button from guests. (Nothing about how it works currently should cause anything bad though in regards to ranking for example. It’s just unnecessary to have the search bots run into those pages again and again.)

[Steve Bullman]

gotcha, thanks

[bfarber]

9 hours ago, opentype said:

It’s the “Ignore this topic” button. It’s member-based and contains a protection key. So Google sees it, but it is not allowed to see the actual page it links to. 

It would be better to hide that button from guests. (Nothing about how it works currently should cause anything bad though in regards to ranking for example. It’s just unnecessary to have the search bots run into those pages again and again.)

This button shouldn't be shown to guests in 4.3.

[Steve Bullman]

that button was actually a plug in.  I just checked and I had it set to show to all.  changed it to selected usergroups only. 

14 hours ago, bfarber said:

This button shouldn't be shown to guests in 4.3.

is this going to be part of the core in 4.3 then?