I’ve got a site that’s gotten the “Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs” error. It looks like the bad urls (returning 404s) are all of the form https://site/t/slug/id?page=XXX. And changing XXX to XXX-y makes the URLs work fine. (I thought it was an off-by-one error a…

This is only an issue we can address if you can find actual cases on the forum where the meta tags link to non existent pages If the content is looking good and google are just having an adventure adjusting to the fact that a book once had 100 pages and now has 10 there is not much we can do, a 301…

Found this topic after encountering the same issue. I fail to see how this is google’s problem, you can’t expect every page to be reindexed every hours. Are you seriously saying that discourse can’t check that if a link includes ?page=2 which would translate to /21, but if the topic shrunk to 19 p…

Make sure you are on latest (2.2 final or 2.3 beta) as an important fix went out for web crawler pagination about a month ago.

We are already using 2.3.0.beta2, so that did not fix the issue.

Can you provide live URLs demonstrating the problem?

Of course, e.g. take the first hit from this search , which links to this . (assuming google will show you the same results, but if not, then just use the last link of my reply directly.) if you remove page=2 or use page=1 it works. Thank you for looking into it, @codinghorror !

Actually, you don’t need live examples from elsewhere - take this thread on your own server, it doesn’t do too well either: Googlebot 404 errors due to page numbers - same problem.

That topic was split so you destabilized the page number, it is a fundamental limitation with our numbering implementation Take a book analogy, in a book if you rip out page 77, page 200 remains page 200. In Discourse page 200 becomes page 199 I guess, maybe it does make sense to auto redirect hig…

[image] sam: That topic was split so you destabilized the page number, it is a fundamental limitation with our numbering implementation This very topic wasn’t split and has the same problem . Therefore the way how the shrinking came about matters not. Take a book analogy, in a book if you ri…

[image] stas00: This very topic wasn’t split and has the same problem . Therefore the way how the shrinking came about matters not. Hmmm :thinking: not seeing any page=2 here at all, when I Google: "Googlebot 404 errors due to page numbers" site:meta.discourse.org [image] stas00: it shou…

Googlebot 404 errors due to page numbers

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Pothi (Pothi Kalimuthu) May 15, 2026, 10:00am 15

Yes, it’d be a nice to have such as a solution. When there is a 404 for a particular page number, it could be redirected to pageNumber-1 .

Topic		Replies	Views
Canonical tag on topic URL Bug	22	2524	February 7, 2017
?page= bug, both in core and in sitemap plugin Bug sitemap	3	629	May 27, 2021
Sitemap plugin - no ?page=… urls in default sitemap Bug sitemap	12	1371	October 18, 2023
Pagination URL scheme not passed through when topic is renamed Feature	21	4087	May 20, 2015
?page= sometimes redirects to a page with a different canonical URL Bug	2	741	October 19, 2020

Googlebot 404 errors due to page numbers

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