Status 406 errors

[DanB]

I've been getting these since msnbot started crawling my site last year.

It seems to read my robots.txt file fine but just about every other non txt extension page from my site shows a HTTP status of 406.

My site doesn't seem to be listed in the MSN database.

[DanB]

Google has 92 pages. Yahoo 39. MSN 17.

Here's another thing. A couple of my page descriptions on MSN have descriptions from other websites (websites that aren't mine). The text they have associated with my page is not (and has never been) on my website.

[DanB]

nobody?

must be a clique thing here.

[py9jmas]

406 is "no acceptable variant". When a user-agent sends a request, it can list the file types (mime-types) it can handle. This allows the server to return a type of file it knows the client can cope with. If the file requested is not available in any of the forms the client can accept, the server returns a 406 error.

In short, msnbot has requested a file it has told the server it can't deal with. I see this when msnbot tries to download .png graphics. You definitly shouldn't see this on requests for HTML pages. If you are, the mime-type settings on your server are probably wrong.