Not a bug Google Search Results links produce error on forums

[dotgarden]

Hi,

I have a new forum, with only a dozen members... but highly targeted forums and threads. I'm trying to grow something, here. I searched google for my site, and it has 5 pages of highly targeted results. That's great. When you start clicking on them is where the trouble starts.

The ones that link directly to a thread work out just fine, click right through to a thread. BUT, if you dig deeper in the listings, you'll see some search results that bring you to forums. These, almost every one of them, returns an error. The url structure is like this: forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=-1&f=14 (this throws an error)


I'm also seeing lots of pages like "Recent content for username" and where username is, is a users' name. Often, it brings up a basically blank page, because the person has no recent content....

There is a google search result for the Search page.

Is there a way to have google NOT index these kinds of pages? Can that be built into Xenforo? A setting? Something in the head tags?

 

[Mike]

The forumdisplay URL is clearly a link to your vB - remember that Google takes time to index stuff.

If you want Google to stop indexing things, you can use robots.txt or some meta tags: http://www.robotstxt.org/ Though do consider that in a normal search, it's unlikely that those pages will actually come up. The site search is showing you everything, and isn't ordered by relevance.

 

[dotgarden]

ah, ok. thanks