Truncated response message in WMT

[internetheaven]

Some of my URls (2-4 pages at a time from a 700+ page website) keep showing up in the "unreachable" error section of WMT.

They state "Truncated response" as the problem, with their help section saying that means: "The server closed the connection before we could receive a full response, and the body of the response appears to be truncated."

Server guys there are no such errors showing in my logs.

Anyone come across this before? What does it mean?

Thanks
Mike

[tedster]

It means that, for some technical reason, the full server response never reached the googlebot server that made the original request. If your servers are logging errors properly, then the shortcoming lies somewhere else in the data path.

I notice that you said "2-4 pages at a time". So if it's not the same urls having trouble over and over, there's not likely to be anything here for you to worry about.

[internetheaven]

Server guys looked in to it further and they said there is nothing actually wrong with the way the 301 redirects are written, that maybe Googlebot is not processing the 301 correctly and is reporting a "truncated response" error because the 301 redirect page does not really return anything.

Does that sound plausible?

[tedster]

No, that sounds a bit garbled. A 301 redirect does not have a page - it's only an http server header that redirects the user agent to another url.

[internetheaven]

I notice that you said "2-4 pages at a time". So if it's not the same urls having trouble over and over, there's not likely to be anything here for you to worry about.

I had nocache meta tags on the majority of those pages. I removed them to see what Google sees. Now, every page in that folder is in the Google crawl error section with "Truncated response"!