About.com 404's everywhere?

[Brett_Tabke]

I've been surfing some topics through Google. Many of them include about.com pages. I've run into 27 404's at About.com that are still in the google cache.

Is about restructuring or pulling content?

[Laisha]

Could it be due to the lawsuit?

[skiguide]

It's a result of the last round of About.com Guide cuts - many sites were pulled from the service,so they redirect to the main category pages.

those that are 'unguided' but still exist are ones that they want to find new people to run the topics.

[europeforvisitors]

You mean there's been *another* round of guide cuts since 300+ guides were dumped in September? (I assume that Google isn't still caching pages from six months ago.)

Also, the original post here referred to 404 errors, not redirects to channel pages. That sounds like a server glitch, not the result of a guidesite being eliminated. (As far as I know, missing guidesites--or even missing pages within a guidesite--always take users back to the About.com home page, channel page, or individual site home page instead of returning 404 errors.)

[skiguide]

no europe, not additional cuts;0

but, i think there's been more resignations since then... i digress...

Anyhow, you're right, i don't think I read the original post correctly maybe i was thinking of a custom 404 situation where if you didn't find the page, it would automatically redirect to the channel homepage.

maybe it is something they're playing with on the servers then i don't know.

FWIW, google will revert back to some pretty old material when it's in the middle of an update, so it's not unheard of to see a cached page several months old. I caught one of mine a couple of days ago.