CUNY Academic Commons

One thing I meant to note is that, as part of the 1.13 release yesterday, we changed the behavior of login links on mapped domains like yours (where your site is available at a URL that doesn't contain .commons.gc.cuny.edu). When you attempt to log in, you're led to the main site's login page - https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-login.php - with a redirect back to the subdomain newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin. It could be that this change will obviate Google's complaints.

Boone Gorges wrote:

One thing I meant to note is that, as part of the 1.13 release yesterday, we changed the behavior of login links on mapped domains like yours (where your site is available at a URL that doesn't contain .commons.gc.cuny.edu). When you attempt to log in, you're led to the main site's login page - https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-login.php - with a redirect back to the subdomain newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin. It could be that this change will obviate Google's complaints.

Thanks, I'm running another crawl tonight to see if this helps clear things up at all and I will keep you posted.

Hello,
The errors don't seem to be subsiding, but I am noticing that the site is now automatically redirecting Guest Author pages to the main domain. For instance, I am attempting to reach https://newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu/author/adom-getachew/ and each time I visit this URL it redirects to https://newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu. I cannot override this in the redirect plugin I downloaded.

Having this functionality is very important to the site, and it was working fine before the server switch. Is there any possible way to override this?

Thank you,
Diane

The guest author archives problem is not related to the reported 503 errors. It's actually due to a configuration issue with the Yoast SEO plugin.

I fixed this by re-enabling "Author Archives" on the Yoast SEO settings page:
https://newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#archives

So guest author archives should work again.

Diane, I would also recommend disabling the "Redirection" plugin unless you really need to redirect a certain URL to a certain page.

Thanks for helping with that! I disabled the Redirection plugin but it seems to have resulted in many many more crawl errors due to 404s. Just curious - why do you recommend disabling it? Also there seem to be an awful lot of redirects anyway (even with the plugin disabled). Is there any way to keep this from happening. I believe it might be affected the site's SEO ranking overall.

The reason why I mentioned disabling the Redirection plugin is when I took a look at the NLF site, I saw that there were many rules listed under the "Tools > Redirection" page. I'm not sure if you needed all of those rules, but some might have conflicted with the 503s you reported earlier. Is the NLF site still getting 503s or has it reduced over the past couple of days / week? If you need to re-enable the Redirection plugin, try removing all the current, custom rules and add new rules as they are needed.

Secondly, regarding the 404s, are they warranted? If a page doesn't exist, it should 404 naturally unless you need to redirect an older page that no longer exists to a new version of the content, which resides at a new URL. Also, check to see if the pages on NLF are linking to older links that no longer exist, and either change the link to the proper one or remove the link.

Can we circle back in a week or so to see if the problems have reduced or subsided?

If we are still seeing 503 errors for wp-login.php links, then I would recommend that we use nofollow and noindex tags on the wp-login.php throughout the Commons. To me, the wp-login.php page has no relevance to search engines and I wouldn't mind adding those tags to the login page.

Hi Raymond,
I decided to re-activate the Redirection plugin, and I cleared the rules which existed and only implemented the ones which were necessary (as needed). As for the 404 errors, they seem to be warranted, and I am fixing the broken internal & external links so I think I have that under control.

And regarding the 503 errors (the original question!), I do think that using nofollow and noindex tags on the wp-login.php throughout the Commons would be a wise solution. I know that for New Labor Forum that is certainly the case. Having these URLs generally show up in site crawls seems to be making the records messy, and these errors seem to veer back and forth between 503s and 404s, which is what had me confused at the onset of all this.

I should mention that I'm doing this work on a contract basis so after next week I don't know if I'll be able to follow up on this any further, so I'd like to get all of these issues resolved this week if at all possible.

One more question: The meta data that I am adding to Guest Author pages through Yoast (title tags & meta descriptions) do not seem to be taking. It seems that the primary Author meta info remains. For instance, as you can see on Adam Hilton's guest author page (https://newlaborforum.commons.gc.cuny.edu/?author_name=adam-hilton), I have added Yoast SEO overrides, but the default author info (Samantha Valente) continues to show. This is a slightly different issue than the original post so I can start a new thread if need be.

Thanks for your help!

One more question: The meta data that I am adding to Guest Author pages through Yoast (title tags & meta descriptions) do not seem to be taking. It seems that the primary Author meta info remains.

It seems that Yoast SEO does not support the "Guest Authors" feature from the Co-Authors Plus plugin, which is why you see the original author's name in the <title> tag. We can add support for this in our next update, scheduled for Tuesday.

Can you create a new issue for this so we can track it? Thanks! No need to do this, I've created a new ticket -- #9810.

I should mention that I'm doing this work on a contract basis so after next week I don't know if I'll be able to follow up on this any further, so I'd like to get all of these issues resolved this week if at all possible.

Sure, please follow-up whenever you have the time.

Hello, Yes I just saw the new ticket, thank you! If you could add support to the "Guest Author" pages that would be great. I have some additional feedback about Jetpack that I can provide, but I will do that on the other thread.

Hi Raymond,
I was having trouble finding the new issue, but it looks like Boone may have implemented a fix. I am noticing lot more redirects popping up as well (I believe leftover from the server name switch), but I am wondering when all of the Tuesday changes will be implemented so I can run a new crawl before trying to tackle any leftover issues. As I mentioned, my contract ends this week, so I would like to tackle as many issues as possible before that happens.
Thanks!
Diane

Hi Diane,

The fix in #9810 is now live on production, so the Yoast SEO and Co-Authors Plus issue should be fixed now.

I did a quick test and it looks like it is working.

Excellent. I will run a new crawl to see where things are at and if any additional fixes are needed.