As designed Merged thread - URL doesn't redirect to the new thread

[AzzidReign]

Affected version

1.5

Not sure if this is intentional, I couldn't find much information posted on here in regards to it. I've been seeing this popping up more and more in my WMT about the merged threads being 404. Here's 1 example:
https://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/bo4-bot-lobby-method.1740346/

It was merged with:
https://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/possible-bot-lobby.1739217/page-11#post-13804196

You can see the link to that specific post was what the 1 link was by viewing the Google Cache.

I've questioned the moderator that was responsible for the merge but haven't heard back from him yet. Does it matter what options are tickets for the redirect?

If it does matter and it helps google see what the new URL is, is there a way to redo that redirect (probably not but I'm asking anyway)?

 

[Mike]

Just to confirm, are you saying the first link (thread ID 1740346) is the merge source (and 1739217 was the destination)?

If so, then the source thread gets deleted and any links to it will 404 -- it's no longer a valid thread so this is expected and a note by Google that this is not found wouldn't indicate anything is wrong.

The redirect option allows you to leave a redirect listing in its place for the specified amount of time. This will use the old ID so existing links will redirect to the new thread, but only if you select a redirect and while it's retained. This is not generally targeting search engines, but users that might be looking for the old thread.

If you didn't choose to create a redirect at the time, there isn't a way to redirect it after the fact. If you are only trying to target search engines, then you may wish to do something outside of XenForo to redirect specific URLs.