Forum Moderators: open
My server is running thttpd/2.25b. My admin set up the 301 redirect for a large batch of files. When I check them with the Search Engine World redirect tool the code returned is 301.
However, when digging through the logs I can see that Googlebot is still getting a 200 status code and as a result I've got the new pages picked up by G and the old, inexistent pages with "File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML" and no snippet. When I click on View as HTML I get a blank page. When I click the link I get redirected to the new page.
Actually when looking through the logs I can see that NO 301 code is actually returned. The old page always gets a 200 code and then the user/bot is redirected to the new page. But why is the SEW tool returning a 301 code?
Could this explain why my traffic dropped by 20% since the redirect?
Any help is greatly appreciated,
the surest way to look at this is to
install a sniffer on your local computer
and browse to the page in question, then
look at the trace.
As to what's in your log files, this is highly configurable and varies widely on Apache servers for example. I'd expect thttpd to be similar.
The "File format unrecognized" bugs me. Before the redirects were in place, were the pages blank at some point? If so, that would explain it.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it. The old links in Google won't hurt you. But the fact that Google doesn't have the content anymore would explain the drop in traffic. Traffic should resume as Google picks up the new pages, and I bet they'll start dropping the old urls in a few weeks.
