Uh oh, bad setup for bot

googlebot giving different message...lost index

[smiddy]

I was doing great on the first page of Google. Then something changed over night. I used to get this entry in my logs from the bot:

GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 ...Googlebot...
GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 .... Googlebot ....

Now I'm getting this and no index from Google:

GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 302 ...Googlebot...
GET /error.htm HTTP/1.0" 200 .... Googlebot ....

Any ideas on what I did to cause this? The 404 was working fine, now it is getting a redirect to my error page.

[smiddy]

To add to this.

I did add this to my httpd file:

ErrorDocument 404 <url>/error.htm

Would this be the culprit?

Also, msn was doing the same thing. And it only does it for my main page. My main page is out of the search engines now.

[jdMorgan]

We need a lot more information on why a 404 handler has anything to do with your index page, but generally, the syntax is

ErrorDocument 404 /error.htm

and NOT

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/error.htm

The latter syntax will always generate a 302 instead of a 404, as described in the ErrorDocument documentation [httpd.apache.org].

Test your site thoroughly after making configuration changes using a Server Headers Checker [webmasterworld.com].

Jim