vbseo not returning 404s for certain urls

Hi,

I have just replaced a SMF forum with Vbulletin. I am not too worried about redirecting all of the urls from the old forum to the new vbulletin urls, apart from the main forum boards, which I have redirected using custom redirects.

I would however like to give a 404 status for any old urls that I have not redirected. But it seems that most of the old urls do not return a 404 status code but redirect to the forum homepage.

An example of an old SMF url is: http://forum.mydomain.com/index.php?board=1.0.html

Is there anything I can do to make these urls return a 404?

Thanks

Hello,

do you have "File not found" handler option in vBSEO CP set to "Send 404 code"?

Hi,

No, I have it set to 'include custom script'. and I have set up a custom vb 404 page.

This all works well for certain types of urls... e.g http://forum.mydomain.com/this-is-a-bad-url.html will return a correct 404 status and display my custom 404 page. However the problem exists with the old smf urls that I gave an example of in my 1st post.

Cheers

Ahh, I see - old link points to the existing URL.

You can put this in .htaccess file right after "RewriteEngine on" line:

Code:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} board=
RewriteRule index\.php custom404.php [L]

where custom404.php is the filename of your custom 404 handler script.

Hi, no that doesn't work I am afraid.

I have followed these instruction to set up the custom 404: Create a Custom vBulletin "404 Page Not Found" Page, and direct vBSEO to use it.

And I added the following code to my htaccess in the root of my forum:

Code:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} board=
RewriteRule index\.php 404.php [L]

But the old smf urls still don't return a 404 and still just go to the front page of my forum.

Could there possibly be something wrong with the code you gave me?

Thanks for the help

I have just tested the url on the vbseo forum and it has the same problem, the bad url redirects to the home page and doesnt return a 404:

http://www.vbseo.com/forums/index.php?board=1.0.html

What is an example URL that doesn't work for you?

Try this url: http://www.vbseo.com/forums/index.php?board=1.0.html

As you can see it does not return a 404. I am having the same problem with my forum. I have a few hundred urls from my old forum in the same format that I need to generate 404s on my new vbseo'd forum.

We do not have the mentioned code in .htaccess (since we never had SMF installed and that URLs is not indexed in our case). Since there can be ANY parameters added to ANY URL, it's not possible to handle all of them automatically.

Ok, fair enough. Do you know what code I could put in my htaccess to handle this url format?

Thanks

The code above should work (I just tested it on my local dev instance).

Hi Oleg, this code still doesn't work for me.

Could it be that I have defined homepage aliases for index.php and index.php? in the vbseo control panel? What code can I use if this is the case?

Thanks

What is your full .htaccess file contents now?

My full htaccess is as follows. Note that my forum is installed in the root of a subdomain i.e http://forum.mydomain.com

Also when posting my htaccess in this post for some reason it would not display the '\' in the 'index\.php'

Code:

# Comment the following line (add '#' at the beginning)
# to disable mod_rewrite functions.
# Please note: you still need to disable the hack in
# the vBSEO control panel to stop url rewrites.
RewriteEngine On

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vB folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums/)
RewriteBase /

#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !vbseourl=
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|chat|cron)
RewriteRule ^(.*\.php(/.*)?)$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(jpg|gif)$
RewriteRule ^(archive/.*)$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php?vbseourl=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} board=
RewriteRule index\.php 404.php [L]

As it is mentioned above, you should add the code right after "RewriteEngine on" line.