Delete tags upon deletion of thread

[AzzidReign]

I'll admit that I've been lazy with WMT for some time now but I'm trying to resolve the issues that Google is saying there is with my site and so far, the majority of them are coming from tags. When a thread is deleted, the tags remain and on those tag pages (i.e. /tags/something), if there is only 1 tagged thread on the site and it links to that deleted thread, will show as a 404 for Google. I'm hoping that others would agree that when we delete a thread, the tags should be cleaned from that thread and if that was a unique tag to that thread (meaning, no other threads had that tag), the tag should be removed from the tag database so Google won't follow the link on the tag page and find a 404.

 

[Mouth]

when we delete a thread, the tags should be cleaned from that thread.

Yes.

 

[eva2000]

Definitely use to have such a feature

 

[Joe Link]

Couldn't agree more!

 

[Chris D]

We actually already do this so we're likely going to need some details in case there's an explanation as to why it doesn't appear to be working for you.

Can you confirm the specific XF version you're running?

 

[AzzidReign]

1.5 newest. I had noticed it when Google would tell me there was a 404 on a tag that only was in a single thread that we deleted.

 

[Chris D]

What exactly are the "errors" Google is bringing up? If we're talking about a hard delete of a thread then a hard 404 of the tag is expected because the tag no longer exists. If we're talking about a soft delete of a thread then a soft 404 of the tag is expected because the tag exists, but, technically, so does the thread and could be undeleted at any time.

So, in both of these cases, the behaviour I described is expected. Content which Google has already indexed which becomes unavailable may get flagged up as 404 until it drops off their index, which is correct. Pages which exist which return a "no results" message would be classed as soft-404 "errors". I say "errors" because they're not actually errors at all, unless the behaviour is unexpected. In this case the behaviour is expected because we've performed a search (successfully) but it hasn't returned any results.