Broken links due to ?do=email&comment=47180, etc

[Graeme S.]

Is there any solution for this?

It looks like a lot of indexed URLs have parameters. 

E.g. ?do=email&comment=47180

All of these are just giving errors: Page Not Found.

Removing the params loads the topic fine. Any quick fix for this to redirect to the topic without landing users on a page not found?

[bfarber]

That used to be a page in the software, and it is no longer a valid page in the software. It absolutely should produce a "page not found" message so that search engines know that the page no longer exists and it can be delisted/deindexed.

[CoffeeCake]

@Graeme S. you could rewrite the URL at your web server to remove the do=email bit. That's probably an artifact of the previous "e-mail this page" functionality that was found to be used by spammers and subsequently removed in an update to 4.4.x. You'd want to throw a permanent redirect in your rewrite to make sure that spiders don't see it as duplicate content.

All that said--where are you seeing these addresses pop up? If in your error logs, it's not real humans and may be indicative of attempts to find and exploit unpatched IPS installs.

[Graeme S.]

1 minute ago, Paul E. said:

@Graeme S. you could rewrite the URL at your web server to remove the do=email bit. That's probably an artifact of the previous "e-mail this page" functionality that was found to be used by spammers and subsequently removed in an update to 4.4.x. You'd want to throw a permanent redirect in your rewrite to make sure that spiders don't see it as duplicate content.

All that said--where are you seeing these addresses pop up? If in your error logs, it's not real humans and may be indicative of attempts to find and exploit unpatched IPS installs.

Yeah, it was in the error logs. I just assumed these links were indexed on search and people are finding them through there.