vBulletin 3.x vBSEO keywords in links on forum no longer working, defaulting back to /forum/txxxxx/

[richseo]

I have a problem with my forum in that the rewriting of the forum links to show the keywords is no longer showing (I noticed the problem last Sunday), instead the forum links are defaulting back to the old type, example being /forum/txxxxx/

Has anyone come across this problem before or the best way to deal with the issue. I have submitted a support ticket to vBSEO but guess they are rather busy at the moment dealing with the backlog of work.

I'm a newbie in terms of coding and other stuff so try and make it plain and simple

[richseo]

OK, I sorted it, and for anyone suffering a similar problem with the keywords in the links disappearing, it was the vBSEO config.xml file which had been modified, so I uploaded an older version from a backup I had and overwrote it - I assume this is to do with the exploit doing its rounds at the moment!

[richseo]

UPDATE:

Although I managed to get vBSEO working again with the keyword link vBSEO rewrites, it would seem that when the forum reverted to normal links across the entire site for approx a week, Google indexed the site with the non vBSEO keyword links and now Google Webmaster tools is showing over 10,000 pages missing with a 404 error and the numbers seem to be growing on a daily basis.

Is there anything that can be done to fix this because the page views for the site have totally collapsed along with the forum rank?

[Andrés Durán Hewitt]

Hello,

I checked the config.xml file you attached in your ticket and the following rules in your .htaccess should help you recover from this issue (place them right after RewriteEngine On line):

RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=showthread.php&t=$1&page=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)/$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=showthread.php&t=$1 [L]

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=forumdisplay.php&f=$1&page=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=forumdisplay.php&f=$1 [L]

[richseo]

Hi Andrés,

Thanks for your help with this.

I added the above code in the .htaccess file shown in the forum root (I assume that is the correct .htaccess file to modify),and it does seem to have fixed many of the problems with the 404 errors though the following are still showing pages as missing:

Do you have any idea how to fix the 404 errors for the following and similar links:

/forum/users-s1/
/forum/poll11/

Google is now showing over 14,000 missing pages so I'm hoping the numbers will start dropping now!

[richseo]

Just an update to let you know that Google webmaster tools is now reporting 35,807 page not found 404 errors of which many of them are now:
/users-o1/
/users-n1/
/users-p1/
etc.

Andrés, If you would like me to provide you with access to Google webmaster tools please pm a valid email address.