No broken links, but plenty 404s?

[benni_203]

Hello all,

I keep finding plenty of hits on my 404 page. I was researching everything on the site and cannot find any broken links. The log keeps on bringing up for example:

xx.xx.xx.xx - - [22/Jun/2005:05:41:24 -0400] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0" 302 291 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.xx.xx.xx - - [22/Jun/2005:05:41:25 -0400] "GET /404.html HTTP/1.0" 200 4135 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

What is the deal with the favicon.ico?

Does anyone has an idea how I can deal with that? Are there errors on my website?

Thank you!
Benni

[AKat]

Hi benni_203. I know what you are talking about. I used to get that error all the time too. I use Netscape and never use IE as a browser, so I didn't know what that was about.

It turns out that what the favicon.ico is about is the little bitty icon (about 16x16 pixels) that IE will put next to one of your pages when somebody bookmarks it.

I just did a google on the favicon.ico and found a site that would let you create one very easily. All you have to do is create one and upload it and the errors will stop.

At 16x16 resolution, you don't need to be artistic -- it can't be read well at all. Virtually anything will do.

Good luck to you.

Akat

[larryhatch]

Without knowing, it looks like you have no favicon.ico file on your site.
Google up 'favicon' to see how to set that up.
What it amounts to, is the little square icon that shows up next to your listing
in the search engines, or else in the address bar when people visit your site.

Many or most search browsers look for that automatically, presuming its there.
If it isn't, instant error. Some browsers may look for a 404-error page also.
Any 'missing file' including favicon generates a 404 error. -Larry

[Reid]

that second entry is requesting 404.html

when your server issues a 404 (page not found) error, it will serve up 404.html page instead of requested page.
In this logfile the user-agent requested 404.html
server respond 200 (ok) and served up 404.html

[AniKarenina]

You can create a favicon fairly easily; I did this recently myself. I had pre-existing art to work with (though shrinking to 16x16 is hard!) and the whole thing--looking it up online and downloading a plugin and testing the file and all--took about half an hour.

An important thing to note is that you can't just save the file with the extension ".ico" as that still won't work--it must be a Windows icon (ICO) file. You can download a free plug-in for Photoshop to add the Windows icon file type.

More info: [en.wikipedia.org...]