Hi - I have recently installed the Google SEO plugin and for my SEO I use SEOMOZ, which is a renowned as a googd SEO tool. This is now picking up loads of 404 errors - over 4,000 and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. For additional infomation I have added the plugin page so you can see it looks like it is set up correctly.
MyBB returns 200 OK by default for error pages; Google SEO 404 changes it to a HTTP error code. You can configure which error code to pick for different kinds of errors (choice based on the $lang->error_* variable used for the error message).
Use robots.txt to prevent Google from accessing pages which will only raise error messages (newreply.php newthread.php reputation.php etc.). There's an example robots.txt in the Google SEO archive.
Thank you for this reply - which of the above options is the best option? The second option I don't quite undertand - how many files will I need to update for this and where is the Google SEO archive please, thank you
Also, are you saying that these errors have been there all the time, but describe differently now with the SEO plugin?
See the robots.example.txt file in the Google SEO zip archive you already downloaded.
MyBB shows a lot of error pages to search engines if they are allowed to follow new reply, new thread, add reputation, etc. links to actions they are not allowed to do.
How to update Google Seo?
Thank you frostschutz - have uploaded the robots.txt and will see what happens with the new crawls with Google and SEOmox. Russell
Farooq, something seems to be killing the page=x parameter before Google SEO Sitemap sees it. This causes the user/thread/etc. Sitemaps to yield an "invalid sitemap page" error instead of the sitemap, and the sitemap-index.xml?page=1 to yield the same as sitemap-index.xml without page parameter.
This must be an error in your webserver configuration. That or some other plugin interfering somehow. But the long form misc.php?google_seo_sitemap=index&page=1 seems to work fine, which usually rules out other plugins.
I suspect varnish but I have no personal experience with it so I can't help you at all.
If the issue is with the sitemap only, you could always stop using rewrites for the sitemap, Google doesn't care about that anyway. So set it to use the misc.php long form instead. However if your webserver setup is broken in a way as affects parameters in rewrites, chances are you will see similar issues with SEO URLs also.
Here someone was having the very same issue:
http://community.mybb.com/thread-129447.html
And he was also using Varnish.
It's not something I can fix.