Googlebot 404 errors due to page numbers

[rahim123]

This is still a problem.

Sitemap plugin - no ?page=… urls in default sitemap

I’m having trouble with Google Search Console trying to index URLs like https://example.com/t/title-slug/1234?page=3 , which make Discourse throw a 404. Removing the ?page=x parameter makes the URL valid. I assume this is some kind of a side effect of Discourse adding pagination to the version of the site that it serves crawlers:

@sam

I guess, maybe it does make sense to auto redirect high page numbers back to last page.

This would seem to be a decent solution. But I don’t understand why this is happening in the first place? Why is Discourse adding page numbers that don’t exist to the sitemap?

@sam

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

In the case of the topics I’m examining with this issue there are no deleted posts or other modifications to the threading.