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A few of these pages have not been online in several months, others were just renamed a month ago. All are redirected properly using 301 in .htaccess. In most cases, the new, active page is also listed but sometimes after or even way after the so-called "untitled" page listing.
I could understand it taking maybe two months for old pages to drop outa the db, but a couple have actually reappeared. This boggles me mind!
Anne
LOL
PFOnline
annej, you should definetly put a noindex meta tag at the error pages if you can't return a server side 404 status code!
I don't think the problem is new. My wife's Switzerland site used to be at (subdomain + a domain that rhymes with "snout.com"), and it's been gone from there for nearly a year. Yet the URLs are still showing up in Google, presumably because they're being redirected to another subdomain and Google can't tell the difference.
I wasn't nervous :)
These are internal pages that no longer exist, yet they are now (as of this update) showing in SERP as "untitled." Of course, when these pages are clicked on, the actual page (that replaced these) comes up because of 301 redirects in .htaccess. These "real" pages are also showing up in the SERP, but farther down the hierarchy.
This was what I thought strange. Why would non-existent pages be in the "new" Google db; especially since a couple of these have been removed from my server for over 2 months or more? And why would they show up with higher SERP placement than they actual page?
did you check the header of your redirect sites using the header checker tool at searchengineworld [searchengineworld.com]?
I ask because i also had one redirected page listed as "untitled" in august. This was because i used a unproper 301 redirect. To keep it short: my database doesn't support 301 but 302 redirects. To make a 301 (permanent redirect) you have to send a empty page (0 byte) after the redirect header - don't ask, it's just the only way how this great db dev environment works with headers. However, i found out that google reads behind the "Location: yyy.com" line when it crawls a redirected site instead of stopping after that line and replacing the origin location by the new location. If it finds something after the "Location: yyy.com" it searches for the page content. If it then doesn't find a title it just lists it as "untitled". (Like any page without a title tag.) So maybe there's a char after your "Location: yyy.com" line ... a return, linefeed or whatever. I'm really curious if your header is ok!
Robots deal with chars - they may even "see invisible things". You can test it with the sew tool. It also sees more than a human eye. ;)
<added>GG, now that i see your answer: since my db software vendor doesn't accept any feature requests until the next release how about modifing the google robot to stop reading behind any "Location:..." header line? A hand full of mac developers need it bad - we can't do any 301 ... just 302!</added>
[edited by: Yidaki at 9:32 pm (utc) on Oct. 31, 2002]
Can you give more specifics? - GoogleGuy
Other than posting the dreaded homepage link, I've pretty much stated (and restated) the whole story. I'm not complaining nor requesting any action; only puzzeled. Thanks for the response however :)
Well, as I have said, the 301 is written properly and my site is not being redirected, only old internal pages redirected to the active internal pages, but here is the result using that header-checker tool:
Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Anyway, I'm sure these old pages will eventually drop off. These are not my most popular entry pages so the user should not be too affected, and the real pages are, in fact, listed also. Doesn't appear that I'm being (mistakenly) penalized for any duplicate content.
Other than this peculiarity, this update has really benefited my site. I just keep reading about what Google wants users to get from a site and I try to supply that, and continue to move up in ranking. Thanks for the help
I have 2 sites each with a different host. The 'not found' pages are '404 Not Found' but perhaps they are missing something that I don't understand as at least with one site the 'not found' page is getting picked up and listed by Google.
If it wouldn't hurt in any way perhaps I should put a 'no index' on them anyway. Is this the correct code?
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
Anne
