Increase in “404” pages

Can anyone tell me how I resolve this issue below

Increase in “404” pages on http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/

To: Webmaster of http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/,

Googlebot for smartphones identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/ that return a 404 (not found) error. If these pages exist on your desktop site, showing an error for mobile users can be a bad user experience. This misconfiguration can also prevent Google from showing the correct page in mobile search results. If these URLs don't exist, no action is necessary.

Where did you see this message?

Hello,

I think the problem is that you have too many dead links on your forum. You need to clean that up.

SLGray wrote:Where did you see this message?

It was sent to me by Google today

Leviosa wrote:Hello,

I think the problem is that you have too many dead links on your forum. You need to clean that up.

How do I do that?

Hello,

Did you remove some forums or topics recently? If yes, this is the reason Google alerts you about the 404 pages. You can easily see the details on your Google Webmaster Tools account:



You will find the list of 404 pages

No I haven't removed any pages recently. here is one of the removed pages http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4310&start=0

And here is what google is talking about

If you look at the list, it is all topics.  It must be topics that were deleted or moved to a hidden area.

Was your whole forum at one time visible to guests?  If it was then Google indexed those topics.  If you changed it where guests can not see them now, Google is getting the error.

No nothing has been deleted at our end although there were a lot of issues transferring to FM so maybe the dead links happened then?

Oh.  You transferred a forum to Forumotion.  Does Google tell you what the full links are in the list?  Did you just transfer your forum to Forumotion?

I transferred about a year back but there were quite a lot of issues for sometime which FM said they had sorted.

Example of the 39 issues

URL:
http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1394
Error details

Linked from


Last crawled: 6/7/16
First detected: 6/5/16

Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page. Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search, but you can use them to help improve the user experience


This is an odd one because I think this refers to the home/index page ?

URL:
http://www.ourbulgariaforum.com/index.php
Error details

Linked from


Last crawled: 4/29/16
First detected: 4/29/16

Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page. Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search, but you can use them to help improve the user experience

The issue is that Forumotion links does not include:  viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1394 .

Our links are like this:  t147406-increase-in-404-pages#1015716.

Index.php is not used, but forum is.

Support Forum Index:  https://help.forumotion.com/forum

So how can this be rectified ?

Have you contacted Google to tell them that the links referred to a forum that were transferred to another host?

No I haven't. So does that mean it's their issue? There was no option to reply to Google

When I visit your forum, I only see one category.  Because of this, Google will not be able to index your whole forum hosted by Forumotion to replace the old links.

So I need to open all forums to guests ? so they are read only to guests?

You can have it where they see the titles, but can not read the posts in the topics.

The best thing would to have it open to everyone so the search engines can index your forum.

Ok thank you I'll try that and see what happens

It will take time for search engines to index your forum.  I would give them at least two months.

Thank you again

If you are still having this issue after 2 months, please return and open a new topic.

Problem solved & topic archived. Please read our forum rules:  ESF General Rules