Thread

Hi,

In my Google Webmasters page I get a lot of crawl errors (soft 404) for the forum like so:

index.php/forums/search_results/f3d1c05ba84588b89ca2fea78d207d32/

Should I be concerned about this?
How come search results are found?

Thanks

EE v2.4.0
Discussion Forum Module 3.1.7

Hi coko,

The value:

f3d1c05ba84588b89ca2fea78d207d32

Is a search hash that’s been cached. It was once a “real page” when someone performed a search, but they expire quickly. That results in the 404’s.

It’s the way ExpressionEngine’s native search works, and I wouldn’t be concerned about it.

Cheers,

Hi Dan,

Thanks, for the reply.
Just to get a bit more insight:
So this behavior is not specific for the forum search? I haven’t seen this come up on any of my sites with the simple search form.
Can I stop Google crawling a cache folder for the forum search, with disallow in my robots file?

Thanks again

Hi coko,

Indeed, those aren’t literal folders. “search_results” is a forum theme file and the hash you see is the UUID passed along to display the results. The standard search module works in much the same way, but with standard ExpressionEngine templates.

You can disallow the URL in robots.txt as you would any other URL.

Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Cheers,

Hi Dan,

Thanks for explaining, that was it, for now 😉

Hi coko,

Fantastic!

If you need anything else, just let us know!

Cheers,