[Forum] Email from GoogleBot about soft 404 errors

[shershne08]

After upgrade from 3.5 to 4.1.12 i got more than 4 emails from google crawl bot (sender: [email protected]) with content like this:
Dear owner or webmaster of http://www.MYFORUIM While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-11 08:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors..

Especialy email title is horrible: Possible outages

URLs of threads on my forum have changed from:
http://www.MYFORUIM/showthread.php?p=1365019 to
http://www.MYFORUIM/showthread.php/34162-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0-NISSAN-NP-300

and i see it' because of this.
So how it could harm search positions of my site in Google and what can dbe done to avoid that?

[beishe8]

...
...Possible outages
.....
So how it could harm search positions of my site in Google and what can dbe done to avoid that?

Did you put this question to your webhost?

[donald1234]

After upgrade from 3.5 to 4.1.12 i got more than 4 emails from google crawl bot (sender: [email protected]) with content like this:
Dear owner or webmaster of http://www.MYFORUIM While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-11 08:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors..

Especialy email title is horrible: Possible outages

URLs of threads on my forum have changed from:
http://www.MYFORUIM/showthread.php?p=1365019 to
http://www.MYFORUIM/showthread.php/34162-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0-NISSAN-NP-300

and i see it' because of this.
So how it could harm search positions of my site in Google and what can dbe done to avoid that?

Why have your url's changed, did you change friendly url settings? If so that will be why you are getting 404's unless you redirect the old url's will no longer be relevant.

[Alfa1]

Change your urls back to the old default settings:
www.MYFORUM.com/showthread.php?t=12345

Google can read this syntax just fine. Those 'pretty urls' are only pretty to humans. Not to bots.

Then you need to make sure you redirect
MYFORUM.com/showthread.php?p=1365019
to
MYFORUM.com/showthread.php?t=12345#31

With a 301 redirect. (permanent redirect) I'm not sure if vbulletin 4 does this by default. Can someone fill me in on this?

[sivaganesh]

When there is a change in URL structure and crawling errors in old page , then you will get this notification.

I use vb4 and when I installed new vbSEO , I got the similar Soft 404 error notification from googlebot.

You can login to google webmaster to see the list of all soft 404 error links.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s.html

[shershne08]

When there is a change in URL structure and crawling errors in old page , then you will get this notification.
I use vb4 and when I installed new vbSEO , I got the similar Soft 404 error notification from googlebot.
You can login to google webmaster to see the list of all soft 404 error links.

ok, thanks, i'll take a look

but is this just temporary problem which will be solved by itself when GoogleBot will reindex all new urls?
or this is a crash, that can lead to a massive loose of search results?

[Alfa1]

If you change your url structure without 301 redirects, then your indexed threads will no longer be in google, until google indexes them again. So any high page rank, pages that have a lot of inbound links, will loose their traffic and you will start anew. Its important to redirect your urls.

[Expert1]

Hi, I also getting same problem but not solution. I am looking for this solution from last one months, asked many question related to same problem and vbulletin.com team replied post this problem to vbulletin.org. And in vbulletin.org nobody replying, I am helpless. If i'll buy ticket support then i know they will tell me that we donot support custom modification. I dont what to do, just waiting to my website slashed down completely.

[BirdOPrey5]

This error is not from a custom modification so I don't understand why a custom modification would be relevant.

The original issue from the original post was (or would be) solved by going to the Admin CP -> Settings -> Options -> Friendly URLs and choosing the first "Standard URLs" option.

His issue appears to be because of non-Latin characters in the thread title are they are being converted to UTF8 codes not actual characters.

If you have the same error, and you upgraded from 3.8 as well, I would suggest you do the same and go back to standard URLs. VB4 is not fully compatible with UTF8 and this is one of the places there are problems. Standard URLs don't look as nice but they work which is far more important.