Truncated/Unreachable Error in GWT - found the cause!

[internetheaven]

Put in a couple of threads last year:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

and have only just worked out the problem last week. It was my fault. As the pages were a mod_rewrite from a PHP displaying as an .html I had inserted the:

header('Content-Length: '.strlen($page));

code -- but in the wrong place. It's a very silly mistake but seems to have been the whole cause as all 1000+ pages that have been showing an "Unreachable" error in the crawl error report and the Fetch as Googlebot area seem to have resolved themselves.

Just wanted to offer my explanation as there are dozens of people experiencing this on the GWT Forum too. Perhaps I'm the only one where the cause is such a school-boy error ...

I've stared at that coding dozens of times for hours on end over the past 18 months ... can't believe I never noticed that before ...

[g1smd]

Hmm, I suddenly have a lot of "unreachable" errors in the last few days - but NOTHING has been changed on the site in the last month or more.

There have been no coding or content changes - unless the host has been messing about with something.

I'll keep an eye of this; and will carefully check the headers again.

[indyank]

Hmm, I suddenly have a lot of "unreachable" errors in the last few days - but NOTHING has been changed on the site in the last month or more.

check out the discovery date for those "unreachable" errors.Do they date back to early 2010 or 2009?

[scottsonline]

G1smd, beginning 11/10 and ending 11/12 we have 1423 dns type errors showing up in WMT. There were no reported problems on our server and no problems on the other two.

Yet another goolge glitch