Why do some links redirect me to Etsy?
Essentially, what
@Qinglong mentioned and me adding that many of these links haven't been updated in quite some time. Consequently, they now either point to domains that no longer exist, to content that has disappeared entirely (such as images), or to some sort of redirect that was set up by the new domain owner. In some cases, the owner (for instance, Mbxx in this case) might have changed, upgraded, or completely switched the domain from, let's say, NF to FV, with redirects in place. However, the links still point to the older XenForo version with the non-friendly URL format after the domain name, which isn't SEO-friendly. When you click on these links, the redirect doesn't work because the browser and server can't figure out how to redirect from the old domain and non-SEO-friendly URL to the new domain and the now SEO-friendly URLs. This mirrors the issue we're experiencing with related OBD Wiki links to articles within the same Wiki.
To explain it more clearly, consider the link
https://example.com/threadId=1, which used XenForo version 1 with the older non-SEO-friendly link and the previous domain. The owner of example.com decided to upgrade the forum, resulting in the non-SEO-friendly URL changing to
https://example.com/threads, just like it is here on OLF. Next, the owner decided to switch domains and set up a redirect from
https://example.com to point to
https://newexample.com. However, the links in the Wiki haven't been updated to reflect this change in URL structure and domain, rendering them essentially 'dead' links. In the OBD Wiki, there are currently thousands—yes, thousands—of such "dead" links to pages or resources that are no longer available or have moved to a new URL format or domain entirely.
The Wiki needs more attention than ever at this rate, and I'm not criticizing anyone. It appears that people have been adding more articles than they've spent time reviewing existing ones to ensure they remain valid and up to date. We should plan this out and address this issue sooner rather than later, as I'm confident that the SEO ranking algorithms used by search engines like Google and Microsoft are negatively affecting our rankings due to all the "dead" links their bots and crawlers encounter within the Wiki itself.
tl;dr: Many links in the Wiki are outdated, leading to errors and "dead" links. We need to address this issue to improve our SEO rankings.
That's enough writing for today son
