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Any idea why google would be doing this?
1) yes, they just crawled the page, indexed the page and return the page for searches on their "real" content. The snippet says it all: they had some bandwith problems the moment that googlebot came visiting.
2) welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].
However, the cache had the error page.
Considering that the page returned a status of 509 (which is in error territory), I feel this is further proof that Google is, at the moment, somewhat broken.
Peter
best search engine
into Google and check the cache.
[edited by: annej at 4:30 pm (utc) on May 25, 2003]
The webmaster of the 509 site prob feels very thankfull to google and prob feels that google is doing a better job if it keeps temporary unavailabe / error returning pages instead of dropping them. I don't think he'd say that google is broken.
From the search engine user's point of view, having an error response page as the #1 returned result is *broken*.
Peter
Hey joe surfer ... site domain.com, notwithstanding a recent 509 error - which is often merely a temporary bandwidth issue so the site might even work by now, is actually a relevant site to your search terms based on our algo. It's up to you to decide whether to check it out.
Unfortunately, it does not. 509 is a custom (non-standard) response code. Perhaps the better code to return would be 503--Service Unavailable.
Regardless, all 500 error codes denote a server error--and none of the 5xx errors have a de jure associated temporary or permanent connotation.
If you want a good index then pages with 5xx errors should not be part of the index.
Peter
Agreed if the server returned http status 509.
But i didn't hear vagelist saying what http statuts code was returned to googlebot. Could be that the server was confused and returned a error page along with a 200 status code?!
That's an internally-generated error document from apache without modification.
It would be the "HTTP/1.1 509 Bandwidth Exceeded" or some such header.
Peter
Just to diversify a tad...How about the webmaster of a #4 ranking site of 2,990,000 which is a blank white page with hidden text? What would he be thinking about Google?
This 'site' has barely, (if at all) changed position since I first spotted it about 2 months ago.
OK, it used to be a humor site and the hidden text is obviously not done for profit, more of a joke I suppose, but then maybe it's Google that's the joke at the moment!
Sie.
Nothing that can't also be returned in response to a status 200.
>It would be the "HTTP/1.1 509 Bandwidth Exceeded" or some such header.
Yes. But you wouldn't see it in the cache.
badgeruk
p.s. No It's not my site that started this thread.
Yah, could be. Who knows? I wonder why nobody laughs about it but complains instead ... ;)
I've personally only seen the 509 code when it was bandwidth related (too personally on 2 occasions this year, situations where we hit our bandwidth ceiling within 36 hours of month's end.
I really do gotta start paying more attention to where we're at on that issue because both times managed to coincide with a late month crawlby from google.
The liklihood of someone purposely creating a html page that looked exactly like apache's error page and placing it in the directory to be fetched with a 200 response is, ahem, highly unlikely.
:)
Peter
erm, peter ... well, no. Since i run my own little niche search engine, i know that there's quite nothing that is unlikely to happen with server setup's, seriously. ;)
However, my guess is that the page in fact returned 509 status. So there are two pov's:
- webmasters should be happy to stay in the google index until the error is fixed
- some joe and jane's prob ignore it, some prob complain about it
Try these searches (no quotes used):
<keyword keyword keyword> (This prank googlebomb page has been number 1 since March; it has survived two updates so far.)
<keyword keyword> (Look at the number 2 link out of 467,000; two weeks ago it was number 1. The directory has been empty since before November, according to the Wayback machine.)
[edited by: ciml at 4:30 pm (utc) on May 26, 2003]
[edit reason] Please avoid specifics. [/edit]
To say google is broken becuase of this means you would say google has been broken for many months, maybe years. Google is not a magician. It cannot index sites that nobody can see!
