MyBB Community Forums

Hi,

I received email from Google search console team as follows:

Quote:Increase in “soft-404” pages on http://mysite/forum/
To: Webmaster of http://mysite/forum/,
Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on http://mysite/forum/  that should return a 404 (not found) error, but currently don't. This can cause a bad experience for your users, who might have been looking for a specific page, but end up elsewhere on your website. This misconfiguration can also prevent Google from showing the correct page in search results

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I have version 1.8.6 running... yes, I know there is an update but I got lots of custom code in there and table modifications so, kinda hard to update without risking it.
Suggestions please?

do you have robots.txt file ? search.php needs to be added in it. [see sample robots.txt file]

[see also few search results]

Thank you, I've had robots.txt in www root instead of in forum directory.
Hope this resolves the issue.

Thank you very much for prompt and precise reply.

(2018-04-05, 02:43 PM)rahat Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you, I've had robots.txt in www root instead of in forum directory.
Hope this resolves the issue.

Thank you very much for prompt and precise reply.

Rahat, your robots.txt file should be in www root instead of forum directory, but you need to make sure the paths listed therein are correct. The sample file posted by .m. includes the line Disallow: /MyBB/search.php, but you should replace MyBB with the name of your forum directory.