Increasing number of /forum/forum erroneous URLs in Google Search Console

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tecman
100% (Exalted)
YAF All-the-Time Topic Starter

2020-05-01T15:45:05Z

Google Search Console is reporting more and more forum pages the Google Bot can't find, and this error is typical. My forum is hosted in the 'forum' sub-directory of the root directory on the website. If the domain name is 'example.com', the forum is located at 'https://example.com/forum/' and URLs of all topics and posts should start with 'https://example.com/forum/'. However, Google finds a lot of pages which start with 'https://example.com/forum/forum/' and sure, it can't find them, reporting a server error 5xx for all them. I can't find those pages, but it seems Google knows how to find them as the number of such errors is constantly increasing.

I've checked the Forum Base URL Mask parameter in the Admin Settings and it correctly points to 'https://example.com/forum/', so I have no clue why this problem occurs. Can you help me with that?

P.S. Currently using YAF 2.31.2. As I remember, I never experienced this problem earlier and it appeared after upgrade to YAF 2.3.

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tecman
100% (Exalted)
YAF All-the-Time Topic Starter

2020-05-04T15:22:20Z

Can it be a redirect problem?

We use the following extra block added to the standard web.config to do redirects from HTTP to HTTPS:

<rewrite>
	<rules>
		<rule name="HTTP to HTTPS redirect" stopProcessing="true">
			<match url="(.*)" />
			<conditions>
				<add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" ignoreCase="true" />
			</conditions>
			<action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}{REQUEST_URI}" redirectType="Permanent" appendQueryString="false" />
		</rule>
	</rules>
	<outboundRules>
		<rule name="Add Strict-Transport-Security when HTTPS" enabled="true">
			<match serverVariable="RESPONSE_Strict_Transport_Security"
				pattern=".*" />
			<conditions>
				<add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="on" ignoreCase="true" />
			</conditions>
			<action type="Rewrite" value="max-age=31536000" />
		</rule>
	</outboundRules>
</rewrite>

Can it cause this problem with YAF 2.3?

tha_watcha
100% (Exalted)
YAF.NET Project Lead

2020-05-06T08:19:45Z

I dont know why this happens, but i guess disallowing the path in the robots.txt would solve the problem i guess.

tecman
100% (Exalted)
YAF All-the-Time Topic Starter

2020-06-09T14:37:17Z

New info regarding the problem.

Recently I subscribed to get email notifications about new posts in some topics, and I got an email with the link to the updated topic and the forum itself. All links start with 'https://example.com/forum/forum/'!! It looks like an incorrect value in the settings to the forum base URL, but I can't find it myself.

Can you help me with that? Maybe, I can check some fields in the SQL database or something like that. How do you build the full URL to all forum topics and posts?

tecman
100% (Exalted)
YAF All-the-Time Topic Starter

2020-06-10T05:53:25Z

Changing Forum Base URL Mask from 'https://example.com/forum/' to 'https://example.com/' helped to solve the problem.

Any comments regarding how the forum engine builds URLs in email notifications based on this parameter?

And I wonder how Google found those 'https://example.com/forum/forum/' links. Can the Google not encounter them anywhere on public forum pages?

tha_watcha
100% (Exalted)
YAF.NET Project Lead

2020-06-11T09:10:31Z

Sorry but i dont understand what info do you need? The full urls using the baseurlmask from the boardsettings. And in your case its https://example.com/ and not https://example.com/forum

tecman
100% (Exalted)
YAF All-the-Time Topic Starter

2020-06-11T15:31:56Z

Our forum is placed in the subfolder named 'forum', and the users use the URL 'https://example.com/forum/' to visit our forum.
Which Base URL must be specified in the settings in this case - 'https://example.com/' or 'https://example.com/forum/'? If it is the former, does the forum engine very smart so it can detect itself that it is placed in the 'forum' subfolder and build all URLs in email notifications properly?

tha_watcha
100% (Exalted)
YAF.NET Project Lead

2020-06-11T16:53:53Z

As i wrote above you need to use https://example.com/ as the name suggest it is the base url and not the forum url

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