HTTP Error Response Codes by BOP5 (Help reduce "soft 404" errors for improved SEO)

[Admin]

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com

This issue was brought to my attention by Sherrie at TAZ in this thread.

The issue is that when Google crawls a site and runs into the vBulletin No Permission message or other standard vBulletin error pages vBulletin gives the standard "200" HTTP response code which means everything is OK, even though there is no real content on these pages. Therefore Google considers these "soft errors" and they can damage overall SEO of your site if there are too many of them.

What this does is make vBulletin return standard HTTP "Error" responses- by default 403 (Not Authorized) for No Permission pages and 404 (Not Found) for general error messages. When Google sees these responses (as opposed to 200) it knows not to bother indexing the page and everyone is happy.

The major limitation of this mod is it requires PHP 5.4.0 or higher. If you are on older versions of PHP the mod will not install.

There are no instructions, once installed it is enabled by default. In Admin CP -> Settings -> Options -> HTTP Error Responses by BOP5 you can enable/disable the mod and choose the response codes you want for the two different error types. You can use any standard HTTP response code available from this list at wikipedia.

The mod works fine on VB 3.x or 4.x however only VB 3.8.8 (still in Beta) and VB 4.2.2 work with PHP 5.4.0 or higher.

To test that it is working use a free online status checker such as: http://httpstatus.io/

Before you install the mod any URL that will show a no-permission or other vBulletin error will show a status code of 200. After installing the same page will show a 403, 404, or other code that you have configured.


------------------------------------------------------

Please "Mark as Installed" if you use this.
Donations always appreciated. :up:
Nominate MOTM if you LOVE it!

Download tuoitreit.vn_product-httpserrorresponsesbop5.xml (3.3 KB)