[mars-hill]

Hi crew,

Since installing BuddyPress, I’ve noticed that Google’s Webmaster Tools is finding pages with ?acpage=xx on the end.

e.g.
http://indietravelpodcast.com/ might read
http://indietravelpodcast.com/?acpage=32
http://indietravelpodcast.com/?acpage=2
http://indietravelpodcast.com/?acpage=15
etc.

I’ve told Google to ignore it, via the Webmaster Tools > Settings > Parameter Handling function but it’s still showing up in search results, analytics and crawl errors.

Doing a search on this support forum comes up null, searching for the string in Google just shows dozens of buddypress sites with the same issues.

Does anyone know what ?acpage=xx is, does or how to get rid of it?

If it is necessary to the running of a BuddyPress site, how can I stop Google from indexing it? (Especially since it seems to be causing penalties … lots of page not found and slow page load errors thanks to it.)

[Boone Gorges]

acpage is the way that BP renders activity pagination to those clients with javascript disabled – such as search engines.

I started a ticket for discussion of technical issues: https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/3116

[mars-hill]

Thanks for your explanation, Boone. The fix is beyond my technical capabilities, and I appreciate you moving it to trac and looking into it.

[@mikey3d]

You haven’t add Disallow: /? in your robots.txt file.

[mars-hill]

Hi Mikey3D, thanks for the fix – testing that in webmaster tools seems to be working. Have added to robots.txt.