Archive links are 404 not found for Google bot

Hi,

the Google bot tells me that a lot of my archive pages of my Mybb forum are broken. How can I solve that? I read that Mybb tells the webserver to send the wrong error code so that Google believes (at this part my understanding beginns, so it may be wrong from here on) that the archive pages should be indexed but they are invalid (returns error) because the thread got deleted.

 

I'm not sure how MyBB works, but if they are returning 404 errors for pages that actually exisit, that would easily be the worst thing I've ever heard of any forum maker doing.

If the thread has been deleted, it would also be deleted from the archives. The only time a 404 error code should be returned is if the page doesn't exisit. If the page is there it should never return a 404 code.

If they don't want archive pages indexed, then there are other ways of doing it.

 

I found the problem and it seems like I was wrong with my theorie before:

Link from the forum frontend that doesn't work: archive/index php/thread-94 html
Link from /archive folder searched myself: archive/index php?thread-94 html
(the spaces were points but I can't post them here, anti-spam prevention)

So how can I fix it?

 

If I remember correctly, the most recent version of MyBB has a setting to fix this behaviour. Use the settings search box to search for "archive" and you should find it.

 

I've found only an option to turn the search engine optimized links on or off for the forum, while I used the term 'archive' in the config search box.

 

ACP > Configuration > Server and Optimization Options > Enable search engine friendly URLs in Archive? = No

This setting only exists in the latest version (1.6.8) so if you're not running an up-to-date copy then there's not much you can do short of modifying the archive's index.php.

 

This setting is already disabled for me. I wasn't able to find that setting via the config search box (bug?).

As I read now on different sites, it's a bug. The archive links are broken in 1.6.8.

 

Strange. I'll make sure it's a filed bug an we have a patch out ASAP.

 

dev mybb com/issues/1489

I think this is the link to the bug report.

 

That still seems to say it's been fixed apart from a minor issue with links on showthread to archive versions.

 

Do you can tell me how to fix that by my own hands? (change which lines of the source code to what) Google and other search engines are reducing my points for that!

 

Just took a look and really it should be working. Are you sure you set the above option to 0 and it still didn't work? Apparently the issue is definitely fixed (though it appears not...)

Also, could you parchance link me to your forum?