Fixed soft-404 lightbox + duplicate user and album sorting pages

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dutchbb

Well-known member
Affected version
1.1.15
Got a few of these in the new google search console: /media/vootuitgang.8044/full?lightbox=1

Maybe set the lightbox link to nofollow? Also had some for /full (without numbers after it).

Had the same for sorting of media (also indexed and stated as duplicate): media/users/joezdh.92584/?order=view_count&container=site&type=image_upload

This is because the media/user and album pages have no rel canonical set. I have set nofollow on the sorting now.


Checked and the images are indexed with different url's on google. data/xengallery is from images in categorie pages. So that is correct, it chooses which image is indexed between data and full.

/media/*/full
/data/xengallery/405/405803-32ed84ac1907e4963108bb37343809db.jpg?1513092112

And from the media_view you have 3 links to the same image. I have put nofollow with the first and second url (full?d is the image itself).

/media/*/full?lightbox=1
/media/*/full
/media/*/full?d=1516803241

Also found some soft-404 for attachments and could be low content pages, so i think this is not a problem because it is stated these are excluded from index.

(In some cases, instead of a "not found" page, it might be a page with little or no usable content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page.)
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708
 
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I fixed this by changing the image url itself to '/media/*/full' in the template instead of '/media/*/full?d=1516803241'. Also i set nofollow to the '?lightbox=1' link and 'show full size' link.

For the media/users and albums sorting pages/url's i set nofollow on the link, but rel canonical is also an option (waste of crawling for me). On xf2 this is not a problem (upgrading soon!).

For attachments the problem was with inserting them as thumbnails in a post, you got 2 url's then (1 to thumbnail and other to full image). I set nofollow for one, full image in my case because thumbnail is shown,

Same problem exsists on the media, categorie and album index. I have set nofollow to the lightbox and preview links for those pages to fix this.
 
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dutchbb said:
(In some cases, instead of a "not found" page, it might be a page with little or no usable content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page.)
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708
Click to expand...

I'm getting this for threads with low word counts now (few sentences), so soft-404 is related to low content pages in this case. Annoyingly it is doing it also for 'attachment pages' (only on the new google search console).
 
I think there's a bit of crossover here with the other thread from Alfa1 so we can consider the majority of this resolved for the final ever XF 1.5 / XFMG 1.1 release.
 
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