301 is the server response for "Moved Permanently"
Andy Langton
11:42 pm on May 15, 2012 (gmt 0)
It's also a request for the site root ("GET /")
But you'll see that as a valid redirect/301 response when bots request (for instance) a URL without the www, that redirects appropriately to the www version.
textex
11:50 pm on May 15, 2012 (gmt 0)
Oh... So the above is not a bad response to see in my logs?
lucy24
12:55 am on May 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
So the above is not a bad response to see in my logs?
No, especially not from the bingbot. It has a strong habit of asking for pages both with and without www.
:: detour to Bing WMT to check on something ::
I can't find a place where you tell them your preferred domain name, with or without. This means either (1) I can't find it, or (2) it really doesn't exist, which in turn implies that part of the Bing Algorithm is to see whether you, on your own initiative, use a canonical form of your domain name.
Further exploring suggests that the one bing request that never goes to the wrong place is BingSiteAuth. Huh.
textex
1:12 am on May 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
Do you mean enabling the URL normalization feature in wmt?
"The benefits include: preventing duplicate content in the Bing index, avoiding having a page's index value split between multiple URL variations, and avoiding unnecessary site bandwidth usage by the search crawler."
But is having it enabled enough or does an actual rule need to be set up?
lucy24
8:57 am on May 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
That's for parameters. There's also the front end of your URL, which may be either www.example.com or example.com. It makes a big mess if both versions are indexed.
Unless your Bing WMT is entirely different from mine, you can't just "enable" in the abstract. You have to specify parameters and then say which ones should be ignored. (Yes, OK, I tried it. Clicking on "enable" when you haven't named any parameters doesn't do anything.)
Hm, come to think of it, I do believe I just recently saw a question about that very subject elsewhere in this Forum ;)
