Google wrongly indexed a topic on Meta

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A user, jack2, discovered that Google indexed a Meta topic incorrectly. When searching for “discourse meta await async,” the first result linked to https://meta.discourse.org/t/async-await-in-plugin-works-in-dev-instance-not-in-docker-instance/82363?page=2, which returned an error page. The correct link is https://meta.discourse.org/t/async-await-in-plugin-works-in-dev-instance-not-in-docker-instance/82363. codinghorror discussed how to handle this issue with @vinothkannans, and later explained that it’s a leftover issue from a Googlebot pagination fix, and the 404 error is the correct response. The issue should correct itself over time.

1

Not sure if it is important, but I ran into a strange issue when looking for one of my old topic on Meta.

I googled “discourse meta await async” and got this:

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image982×464 34.8 KB

The first result is what I was looking for, but the link proposed by Google is wrong:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/async-await-in-plugin-works-in-dev-instance-not-in-docker-instance/82363?page=2

When I click on it, it opens the error page “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.”

So I looked for the topic from within Meta and got the correct link:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/async-await-in-plugin-works-in-dev-instance-not-in-docker-instance/82363
(notice the missing query param)

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2

Hmm, how do you think we should handle this @vinothkannans? A 404 does not seem right.

4

This is leftover old index data from a Googlebot pagination fix related to Google switching to a default Android user agent in the last 12 months. 404 is the correct reply, it should correct itself over time.

6 Likes