Forum Moderators: phranque
the dns changes have been made, and all is well, the forums, forms, email, and html are fine.
We were experiencing slow support that always looked to blame our lack of experience, and also several outages (server down) in the last six months at earthlink, that finally persuaded us to move.
I am glad we did, as we now have our own, I believe the expression is, dedicated server! though it will be more costly than the prior hosting, it will be affordable.
We spend good money on google adwords and overture
Work daily on new content and changes to existing pages.
Are #1&2 on google and yahoo for our keywords.
Have a forum is busy.
Actively seek links from good pages on other sites.
When we look at the latest Urchin reports: we see several Pages>Status/Errors Referrals>Referral Errors 301 and 404
I would like to know your interpretation of these and what can be done to reduce the errors on our site?
Also we are getting about 500 hits per day on our old site (mainly bots) and wonder if we need a redirect there?
Ben
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 3:08 am (utc) on Sep. 18, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed uneeded link [/edit]
As for your errors: I believe that a '301 error' is simply a 301 redirect 'moved permanently.' I know I've seen 301's on sites of which I was rather sure that I hadn't set up any redirects. If this is not a large number, I wouldn't worry. It could even be some kind of redirect that your host administration software uses somewhere. For 404's - if Urchin doesn't tell you which files were requested that you're not finding, do a search of your raw logs to see which files are being requested and aren't served, and ask yourself if your site might have any bad links etc. If not, it's probably just screwy bots looking for something that isn't there, bots do that all the time. If you don't see a great number 301's or 404's, you might just want to forget about it. You may have had the same number of 404's on your other site but just didn't have the same kind of stats available.
any idea who would call this?
our 404's are mainly that we are getting many hits for a non existant script /cgi-bin/link/links.cgi
That comes from spammers scanning for vulnerable versions of popular scripts so they can send spam via your server. The scanning is automated and hits a load of different IP addresses. A 404 or 403 error is just perfect in this situation: it shows that you don't have the script. You coud try and complain, but as the spammers are already using networks of spyware-infected zombie home machines, you won't have much luck.
As long as you don't use such scripts, this kind of thing is little more than line-noise.
