What does googlebot want?

strange query

[Sinner_G]

Looking at my log files, I found googlebot requesting pages like that:

www.mysite.com/page.asp?¦30¦800a000d¦Type_mismatch:_'b_Vers'

Well, the part after the? is what my log file tells me (the site is on an IIS). So what does that mean?

[Dreamquick]

It *might* not be requesting them - when an ASP page dies with an error that error gets appended to the querystring portion of the logs so potentially what you are seeing could be an error your script is generated.

Try it for yourself, create/upload a broken page, visit it and note what the logs show afterwards.

-Tony

[Sinner_G]

So what you are saying is that googlebot looked for page.asp and produced an error for some reason?

[Dreamquick]

Well there are two possibilities - 1) thats exactly what was requested, or 2) the querystring was appended into the logfile due to an error. I'm I were a betting man I'd say its more likely caused by an error.

e.g. if i deliberately break my front page in the local copy and then access that page i see the following in my logfiles;

Page:
/index.asp
Querystring:
񔬎00a01c2rong_number_of_arguments_or_invalid_property_assignment:_'Header'

Which looks a lot like what you are seeing, doesnt it?

- Tony

[martin]

In PHP, with full error reporting, you can get a query string like
?id=Undefined variable $id in index.php on line 55. Probably ASP does the same on some errors.

You never know how a spider visits your site and usually they don't have an established session (which may cause a lot of problems if you're not careful).

[Dreamquick]

martin,

You never know how a spider visits your site

Not entirely true... if could grab a copy of the headers a search engine 'bot uses then you could replicate/test the problem quite easily, at the end of the day a request is just a bunch of text and so most websites couldn't tell the difference between the real bot and a human copy&pasting :)

- Tony

[martin]

>Not entirely true... if could grab a copy of the headers a search engine 'bot uses then you could replicate/test the problem quite easily

You often get things like broken sessions with bots that are not happening with human viisors. I was talking about this kind of problems.

[Sinner_G]

Thanks for the info.

So is there anything I can do about it?

[martin]

>So is there anything I can do about it?

First try to reproduce the way they accessed your site to see if this isn't your mistake or a server error.

If it's not I don't think there's anything you can do.