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Jim
Well, I sure don't know. I haven't ever followed a situation like this before.
I'd suggest sending a report to Google through the search quality or spam-reporting links on their Web site - I'm sure they'd want to know about freshbot raising this Lazurus from the dead!
I'd be interested in learning what happens if you continue to track this problem until it is resolved, and would care to post an update.
And lest my manners be found wanting due to my previous inattention, Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]! :)
Jim
2odd...
...or anybody else who can tell me that this result COULD Be natural?
If not, I'll keep you posted to any changes or response. =)
I have a site which rank #3 and it is always number #3. One day when freshbot come, my site is down so the index is a 404 error. But it is still rank #3.
The reason is simple, the main search are base on the index capture in deep crawl, fresh bot (although affect a little bit on ranking) main purpose is to show a fresh contents in the search results.
On the next day, when the fresh bot come again or maybe just the fresh content is replace back by the original deep crawl content, my site is back with the title.
So don't worry on this, it is not SPAM. The page do exist when DeepCrawl reach it. If the site owner has remove the page (only if he don't know he rank #1) then after the next deep crawl, his site will no longer exist.
And why care on a 404 that rank #1?!? The visitors won't click on a 404 link!
1) It DOES matter because they are taking up the top position and searchers don't know it's a 404 until they click on it. Also gives them a chance to choose to go to a sponsored site. Of course this knocks us down lower in Yahoo too. What if there were 50 error sites ahead of yours and you ranked 51? That would bug you, no?
2) The point that I'm trying to drive home is that this 404 page already HAS been indexed in a deep crawl. That's why even the cache has no content. It's already been dumped and brought BACK by Freshbot. That's why it's such a mystery to me.
1. The option at the bottom of the SERP: 'Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve.'
or
2. Click on the blue smiley ('Vote against this page') in the toolbar, after opening the 404-page.
there are others thinkable. the first one was that you define a errorpage to show the user a real page with text like "sorry, not found on our site". the second one was that the server didnīt throw out a error page with the header 404 but a 200. (which is the case of the first one, too)
then G is not able to delete those pages.
try this search [google.com] and see what I mean. a lot of these pages arenīt a 404-reply for the spider, so how should it know there is no page anymore it requested?
--> BTW, have a look at the 3rd result, thatīs really funny!
[edited by: oLeon at 10:15 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2003]
[google.com...]
If it is a genuine 404, the page may be removed. If it is a redirect, it probably would not unless you had access to the robots.txt file.
If the main URL is a frameset with good inbound links and a good title, then it can be listed high with no real content. Then, if the frame source is a dead URL then you see the 404 error. Google won't list the 404 page (once it sees it's dead), but the frameset page itself will return a 200 response as normal and can be listed.
If this technique was used to point the frame source at something spammy looking (a common domain harvesting tactic) then I imagine that Google wouldn't look upon it kindly. With the destination frame just being a 404, however, I strongly suspect that the site is just malfunctioning.
"and searchers don't know it's a 404 until they click on it."
The result shown is the Google cache. If the 404 only shows up when the searcher clicks on the link then it's because the Google cache doesn't have it as a 404. So you've got to wait a bit longer for a new crawl to pick up the 404 page.
