URL Link Problem - Found in Google Webmaster Tools

[DHewes]

I went to my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and found hundred and hundreds of "Unreachable" URLs in the Diagnostics/Crawl errors section. As I looked through these, every single one of them was Photopost PHP Pro. As I understand this, Google basically crawls the website and follows links - so I am not sure what page these links are coming from - I am still trying to track that down and will update as I find something. Basically, here is what is happening:

My site:

/home/user/public_html/forums ---> vBulletin 4.0.1
/home/user/public_html/photos ---> PhotoPost PHP Pro 7.0.1 with the updates

PhotoPost is fully integrated into vBulletin full CMS suite, and working fine.

All of the URL's that DO NOT WORK that Google found are constructed as follows:

http://www.domain.net/forum/calfeexp/p6-calfeexp.html

The CORRECT WORKING LINK is:

http://www.domain.net/photos/calfeexp/p6-calfeexp.html

Now, the links include everything from individual photos, galleries, user profiles - basically everything PhotoPost links to. In every case the top level folder should be PHOTOS and is listed as FORUM.

At this point I am still not sure where these bad links are coming from, as I am clicking every link I can find and have not yet hit this. Also not sure if vB is playing a role (with it's RSS feed generation perhaps?) or if I made a config errror in PhotoPost. The site itself, however, is working just fine. It would just be nice if Google could pick up these PhotoPost pages (which it does not appear to be doing).

Will keep you updated, but Chuck - if you have any ideas I would appreciate it.

[Chuck S]

well we arent providing links in our code to images based on a forum url so I dont have any suggestions for you there about google. All links that I find in photopost to images are correctly set to the gallery.

Maybe a hack you have installed in the forum? Maybe relative urls there?

[DHewes]

I have spent hours going through every possible link I can find and nothing on the site is "messed up". The links that are wrong in Google to match up to the RSS feed links, but the RSS shortcut on my site links to the correct place. This makes me wonder, as you suggest, if something is in the context of www.domain.net/forum and interpreting relative URL's from that point that really should be from root or at least ../ I have not idea where those would be as the vast majority of links in PhotoPost and in vB are all created through variables.

As far as hacks, the ones I have are ONLY on the vB side - and minimal (create tabs on top, auto-interpret video links, more options in the quickreply, Who has visited today and Useful links Member Action Dropdown). None of these would seem to have anything to do with this.

At this point the relative URLs and/or the SEO stuff are suspect. Any ideas for tools to try to figure out where these are coming from? Some sort of scanner that would emulate Google?

[Chuck S]

Well we dont use relative urls in our code anywhere as you know which is why I stated I would suspect a hack or something outside the core program.

If google diagnostics had something more like a script associated that I could respond about that would help.