Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We had removed 100s or old pages about an 6 months ago and all those pages were cache by google and because of that every time google tries to get those pages it was getting our Error404.htm page which was Reponsing 404 Error code(page not available) and so google keeping coming to our site with those deleted page and everytime it gets 404 error code.
Now what did i do is to solve this problem permanentaly. I have coded such that as google comes to crawl those deleted page it get 301 Permanent redirect to Error404.htm.
So i think google will now never try to crawl those deleted pages as i have permanently redirected to Error404.htm. But there is one problem while redirecting to the Error404.htm page i have added querystring to the Error404.htm page so that i can store in my database which all URL's are being Permanently redirected, I downside of this querysting i can see is that now in my google-webmastertool under section Not found (1216]) I can see now 100s of Error404.htm with all those pages which are deleted for example
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage1.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage100.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage134.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage293.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage323.htm
I am bit worried now again. Is google storing this Error404.htm pages with querysting to recrawl or it is just listing those URLS which were with 404 Error code.
In short what i want to clear is that if this Not found (1216) url listing is just to let me know that google did not found these url then it is fine. but if google have kept these
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage1.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage100.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage134.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage293.htm
http://www.example.com/Error404.htm?del=/DeletedPage323.htm
URLs for further crawl then it is problem for me. Either i have to remove passing querying string when i do permanent redirect to Error404.htm or i have to think of some other url which give reponse code 200 instead of 404
thanks
Vikram
[edited by: tedster at 8:40 am (utc) on Oct. 26, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]
URLs for further crawl then it is problem for me. Either i have to remove passing querying string when i do permanent redirect to Error404.htm or i have to think of some other url which give reponse code 200 instead of 404
Other Solution i can think of is to Add meta tag in my Error404.htm page i.e
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>Please let me know if i am doing anything wrong
thanks
vikram
[edited by: tedster at 8:53 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2006]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]
By using a 301, you risk having your custom error content indexed for a huge number of URLs over time. This brings bad results. But a 404 gives Google the clear and simple message. Anything else complicates your site into trouble.
Google will keep checking to see that it is still gone, because if it is ever not gone in the future then they will want to index it again.
Never, ever, redirect to an error page. That will cause massive problems.
If a page has "gone" then 404 is the correct code to say that it is gone.
No, just because Google can't get a handle on 404s/410s doesn't mean that we shouldn't. Keep in mind that one of the reasons G treats 404s and 410s as the same (so far) is that they think we as webmasters are supposedly too stupid too tell them apart.
W3cStuff [w3.org]
404 Not Found
The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.410 The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent.
Response.StatusCode = 404;
Response.Status="404 Not found";
Response.AddHeader("Location","/Error404.htm");
Response.End();
thanks
vikram
Response.StatusCode = 301;
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","/Error404.htm?qs="+querystring);
Response.End();
thanks
thanks
vikram
[edited by: tedster at 5:45 pm (utc) on Oct. 29, 2006]
