Webmaster-Tools: Thousend of broken links

phreak

Hi everybody,

I recently experienced a massive raise of broken links with one of my forums. Google Webmaster Tools shows me in the crawling errors almost 180.000 broken links (!). It seems to be an issue with the Open-ID Login that might have been duplicated URLs all around the forum.

You can identify broken links to user profiles like following:
?p=entry/openid&url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252Faccounts%252Fo8%252Fid&Target=%252Fprofile%252FAlex

Also discussions:
?p=entry/openid&url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252Faccounts%252Fo8%252Fid&Target=discussion%252Fcomment%252F61653

And for every comment as well. They all appear as an Error 500.

MMh, i have no clue why? But as search positioning is an important thing for me, i'd like to investigate and solve the problem.
Anyone has an idea?

Greetz

phreak

Hhm, no one knows this issue. Seems like the OpenID Login creates thousends of links appearing ion every page?

businessdad

I didn't have time to check it, but it would be interesting to figure out what's going on. On what forum (and what page) do you have the issue?

phreak

Hi businessdad, would be cool if you take a short look > babyforum.at

businessdad

@phreak said:
Hi businessdad, would be cool if you take a short look > babyforum.at

I actually looked before you posted (I was guessing it was that forum), but I can't find the broken links. Where are they?

hgtonight

Seems like the openID plugin needs to set up crawler rules?

 <a href="signin.php" rel="nofollow">sign in</a>

Source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

phreak

Thank you guys for helping me investigate.

@hgtonight: Maybe Google took that just recently in consideration?

I tried to insert it into ~/plugins/GoogleSignIn/class.googlesignin.plugin.php on line 105

return "<a id=\"GoogleAuth\" href=\"$SigninHref\" class=\"PopupWindow\" title=\"$ImgAlt\" popupHref=\"$PopupSigninHref\" popupHeight=\"400\" popupWidth=\"800\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"$ImgSrc\" alt=\"$ImgAlt\" /></a>";

Wonder if that helps. Google Webmasters will show in some days.

hgtonight

@phreak Since the target is set dynamically, the links appear different to the google crawler. You are spot on with the implementation, IMO.

phreak

@hgtonight: Sorry, could you explain "spot on with the implementation" to me. It's hard to translate that to german. Could be "spot on = you run beeing a target" or "spot on = you did that right". Thanx dude.

hgtonight

@phreak das ist eine korrekte Umsetzung

phreak

haha, but which one? you did that right i guess.

hgtonight

return "<a id=\"GoogleAuth\" href=\"$SigninHref\" class=\"PopupWindow\" title=\"$ImgAlt\" popupHref=\"$PopupSigninHref\" popupHeight=\"400\" popupWidth=\"800\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"$ImgSrc\" alt=\"$ImgAlt\" /></a>"; looks good.

I would do

return Anchor(Img($ImgSrc, array('alt' => $ImgAlt)),
  $SigninHref,
  'PopupWindow',
  array(
    'id' => 'GoogleAuth',
    'title' => $ImgAlt,
    'popupHref' => $PopupSigninHref,
    'popupHeight' => 400,
    'popupWidth' => 800,
    'rel' => 'nofollow')
  );

just because I feel it is more readable

phreak

I tried the fix that @hgtonight and i have been looking in. But this doesn't seem to fix the problem. Still the Webmaster-Tools shows around 105.000 not found link for my forum now. Hhm, i think i ran out on ideas. Anyone has another idea coming to his/her mind?

Adrian

Did you also add nofollow to class.openid.plugin.php?

return "<a id=\"OpenIDAuth\" href=\"$SigninHref\" class=\"PopupWindow\" title=\"$ImgAlt\" popupHref=\"$PopupSigninHref\" popupHeight=\"400\" popupWidth=\"800\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"$ImgSrc\" alt=\"$ImgAlt\" /></a>";
    }

phreak

@adrianonline: No, but thank you for the hint, i should have thought of that in the first place. I added it to the code and will report if there are any changes. Thanx!

Adrian

I should add, I had added no follow to all "social logins".

phreak

Ok, just saw that this has been pushed to the 2.1+ branch also.

Adrian

@phreak, hope it works It may take a bit for Google to clean it up. You can test with this tool: http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/find-broken-links.php

Quick way to make sure it's working

vrijvlinder

Well I think I am getting the same thing now too with o auth, which I am not even using in the forums the errors show up. I have ignored them . But they continue.

Could it be hackers trying to use it to log in and trigger the error since it is not enabled?
This is my message

20130629T203934: www.vrijvlinder.com/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID/Association.php 
PHP Warning:  require_once(Auth/OpenID/CryptUtil.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /hermes/waloraweb093/b2019/moo.vrijvlinder/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID/Association.php on line 20 
PHP Fatal error:  require_once(): Failed opening required 'Auth/OpenID/CryptUtil.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php-5.3.13/lib/php') in /hermes/waloraweb093/b2019/moo.vrijvlinder/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID/Association.php on line 20 
 

and this one too

20130629T233812: www.vrijvlinder.com/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID.php 
PHP Warning:  require_once(Auth/Yadis/PlainHTTPFetcher.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /hermes/waloraweb093/b2019/moo.vrijvlinder/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID.php on line 28 
PHP Fatal error:  require_once(): Failed opening required 'Auth/Yadis/PlainHTTPFetcher.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php-5.3.13/lib/php') in /hermes/waloraweb093/b2019/moo.vrijvlinder/godfreezone/Forum/vanilla/library/vendors/Auth/OpenID.php on line 28 

Adrian

Now that's weird. What are the errors?

vrijvlinder

As far as I can tell they do not cause any problems which is why I have ignored them, I do not use open id or any other sso and they are disabled.