Legacy Rewrite internal/private links to nofollow!

[St4rspl4sher]

Hi,

I submit the following issue as a feature request as it is not a clear mistake. However, the described issue may cause severe damage to the forum visibilities in search engines. Thus, it is highly critical in my opinion and I hope you can provide a solution for the discussed problem (or at least a solution for some parts of the problem):

After switching from VBSeo to DBSeo a large number of errors (>70,000) turned up in Google Search console (Google Webmaster Tools). These are mainly 403 errors referring to the fact that the profile pages in our forum can only be accessed by members, not guests.

In fact, VBSeo did account for the visibility of the profile pages and rewrote all internal links to member.php (in the template system but also in posts or signatures) nofollow if the profiles were not visible to the public. During the last weeks I fixed a lot templates, phrases and files to manually change the member.php links statically to nofollow.

The next thing are private forums. I modified the templates for forumhome and forumdisplay such that links to private forums are marked with nofollow (therefore, a conditional is used which checks for an array containing all private forum ids which is not a suitable solution in my opinion). Also the fact if a forum is visible to guests or not was recognized by VBSeo and accounted with nofollow-links.

Although I manually fixed a lot of the problems which originally turned up something is out of my range: There exist links inside posts or signatures which point to threads in private forums, private forum urls or member profiles. If the Googlebot follows these links he will get a login box as he is not logged in and will count this as a 403 error.

I know this reads like a "VBSeo had this nice features and I want them in DBSeo, too" but I hope you agree with me that the effects that are appearing now (403 errors in Google Search Console) are ruther crucial and could affect the visibility of sites using DBSeo. Hence, if you would add a feature which accounts for some or all of the listed problems, your product and all of your customers could benefit.

If you don't find that the problem is worth it, please tell me the costs you would invoice for coding such features.

Thanks,


Mario

 

[Fillip H.]

The fact that 403 "errors" appear in the Search console is not an error. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, all this means is that those pages were previously HTTP 200 (which was wrong), and now (correctly) returns HTTP 403.

Please do not interpret the message as an error message. What Google is letting you know is that pages that previously were 200 OK are now 403 No Permission, in case this was unintentional. Because you know it is intentional, it's perfectly fine.

In short:
This is not an error, this is not an indication that it's a problem, no further action is required on your end.

 

[St4rspl4sher]

Ok, I agree with you on this (it seems reasonable).

However, from a SEO point of view nofollow-tags on all links that point to pages which do not contain good content would definetely be the better choice. Not only from a pagerank/"link juice" point of view but also from the fact that the Google Bot will spend more time on relevant content pages than on those pages (70,000 in my case) without any content but a login form (If only the "interesting" links have dofollow tags, they will be crawled faster and gain more pagerank/"link juice").

 

[Fillip H.]

But then again, links that have been flagged as 403 in Google won't be crawled further (except rarely to test).

Google themselves say that nofollow links should not be a priority when deciding where to spend resources. I don't believe it's a worthy use of time (or your money) to create this functionality, especially considering it will also have a significant impact on performance by forcing DBSEO to check permissions for a vast amount of links on each page.

Such a huge increase in page load times will likely have a significant negative impact on your pagerank, as load times are prioritised quite high these days. Users don't want to wait for pages to load, so if you cause pages to take longer to load, you lose pagerank.

 

[St4rspl4sher]

OK, your arguments can not be ruled out completely so I will wait and see what the impact from switching to VBSeo to DBSeo will look like (so far nothing bad seems to have happened).

However, the only thing I am worried about is the fact that the 403 errors are listed in the category "Crawl errors" in the Google Search console, so the argument that it is "not an error" is not true 100%.

Nevertheless, a feature (which one can turn on/off in the Admin CP) which would allow to set all links within signatures to nofollow would be nice in one of the next versions of DB Seo. Most of the links to private forums/profile pages which are not themselves on a private page can be found in signatures and not posts as I found out.

Just for my understanding: The Sitemap algorithm is checking permissions and only includes public forums/threads in the sitemap?

Thanks for your replies so far!

 

[Fillip H.]

The Sitemap excludes forums that are invisible, e.g. the "Can View" permission is turned off. It also excludes forums that have the "Can View Others' Threads" turned off, or have password protection.

 

[St4rspl4sher]

Thanks for the information!

 

[DragonByte Technologies]

Hello St4rspl4sher,

This ticket has now been closed with the status Declined.

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