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Hats-Off to Yahoo's 301 Handling

         

jk3210

12:16 am on Aug 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I changed the file name of one of my main pages and did a 301 from the old page to the new page around 36 hours ago. I just noticed that Yahoo has already resolved the change and is reporting (and ranking) the new file name.

Well done Yahoo!

dlefree

10:03 pm on Sep 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



jk3210 -

That's odd - my experience with Slurp has been contrary... I had a client who had decided to use stealth domain forwarding (thanks, registrar companies!) for several domains (which Yahoo promptly spidered, creating some ugly instances of duplicate content) - when I corrected the issue and parked the domains and then set 301 redirects over to the primary domain Google and MSNBot picked up promptly... however...

... one month later and Slurp is still attempting to spider these domains, receiving the 301 Redirect code, and then trying again every day.

Has anyone else seen any similar Slurp mis-behaviour on domain name redirects..?

jk3210

6:52 pm on Sep 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<<Google and MSNBot picked up promptly>>

In just noticed MSNBot also picked up my 301, but Google still hasn't. I'm surprised.

jd01

9:47 pm on Sep 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



My guess is it will take some time for the new status code to populate through the system. When a redirect is undefined (302) or temporary (307), the *correct* http response is to request the page from the original location, not the new location.

It could very well be that pages containing a non-permanent redirect are stored in a location other than the main spidering index, and although they are now receiving the correct response, will probably remain in the a secondary location until a set period of time has passed, and therefore will be requested from the original location until that time expires.

Not sure, but this would make sense, and explains why redirects are picked up at different intervals for different sites. EG if the page has not been cached in 3 weeks and the original location is set to expire in 30 days, the redirect will appear to be picked up quickly, but if the page was cached 2 days ago, it will take almost a month for the effects of the redirect to stop a SE from requesting a page.

Justin

jgomez

10:31 pm on Sep 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



@dlefree

I just posted on a similar case.
'Yahoo, meet 404 and 301'