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It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue: STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when requested: 1. Go to http://www.rexswain
by andrenotgiant 16y ago
It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue:
STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when requested:
1. Go to http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html and enter in http://cakecentral.com/ http://cakecentral.com/
2. Take a look at the response codes, see the 404
STEP 2: Previously, inexplicably, _actual_ error pages on CakeCentral.com such as: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fcake-decorating-photos.html http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fca... returned 302 redirects to Beerby.com
STEP 3: Beerby.com uses a "Soft" error page, meaning if you type in a URL like: http://www.beerby.com/adfadi http://www.beerby.com/adfadi you get a 302 TEMPORARY redirect to a 200 OK page.
- ry0ohki 16y agoI think you're on the right trail, but it's still confusing why this would take the number one ranking over the root domain? Maybe Google thought the entire domain had moved?
- andrenotgiant 16y agoYeah i bet they think that is the temporary location of the cakecentral homepage
- theycallmemorty 16y agoMaybe there are a lot of links to pages on cakecentral.com that no longer exist and now result in 404?
- ZoFreX 16y agoSTEP 4: Google now shows the destination page if your results contain a 302 redirect, not the source page: > Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...
- ot 16y agoAlso interesting that searching {+cake central} or {cake +central} instead of {cake central}, the first result is the correct one. I thought that the "+" just disabled the spelling/synonym/etc... alterations, while apparently in this query it does some kind of post-filtering for exact matches... (since both words do not appear in the page)
- amalcon 16y ago+ historically means "Do not give me any pages that don't contain this word." This used to be very important back when search engines were stupid, and basically ranked on the sum total number of occurrences of each term in the search. Searches for multiple terms would frequently be dominated by results that mentioned one of the terms many times.
- pilif 16y agoThe really interesting question is why the start page of cakecentral.com would be transmitted with a 404 error code.
- kree10 16y agoI don't know if this is what's going on with cakecentral, but I did something like this inadvertently many years ago. We needed to have a CGI script handle all hits under a certain location, and for various reasons mod_rewrite wasn't an option. So I put something like this in an .htaccess: ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/script.cgi I didn't realize until later I needed to explicitly set "Status: 200" in the script's headers. As far as browsers were concerned, everything worked, even IE, since the "error message" (our page content) was long enough to not trigger its built-in error message.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoI pinged the indexing team at Google, but this is almost certainly something weird going on with cakecentral.com's webhost: wget http://cakecentral.com/ http://cakecentral.com/ --2011-01-14 09:12:50-- http://cakecentral.com/ http://cakecentral.com/ Resolving cakecentral.com... 174.129.211.41 Connecting to cakecentral.com|174.129.211.41|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found 2011-01-14 09:13:01 ERROR 404: Not Found. Once the root page of a site starts returning 404s, we have to start taking guesses about the best way to handle it. Best advice for Cake Central: make sure your root page returns a valid HTML page with a 200 response code. P.S. If the webhost is trying to do something sneaky, e.g. things work for browsers, but wget or Googlebot is treated differently somehow, the owner of Cake Central can use our free "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in our webmaster console to help diagnose the problem. Summary: not the weirdest search result I've seen by far. Webhosts that serve up 404s, redirects, or duplicate error pages can cause arbitrary things to happen in search engines. Bing doesn't have the url cakecentral.com indexed at all, for example. Blekko has it, but their page is from Nov. 11, 2010, so they're probably missing the 404 issue by being a couple months older.
- eik3_de 16y agoLike in this case, I find myself looking at the response headers of GET Requests quite often, so: alias h='curl -sIw "Time: %{time_total}s\n" -X GET' This issues a GET on the given URL, printing only the response headers and the time elapsed. Append -L if you want to follow redirects.
- pyre 16y agoHuh? Why would CakeCentral.com pages 302 redirect to Beerby.com?
- trotsky 16y agoFilling in the gaps: cakecentral.com. 90 IN A 174.129.211.41 If you look at http://174.129.211.41/ http://174.129.211.41/ without a host you'll see that it's a nginx reverse proxy/cache both beerby and cakecentral are on EC2. Pretty likely that an error was made at some point in the cakecentral nginx config to include a beerby EC2 private IP as part of a load balance pool or as the single back end (either fat fingered or by retaining an old IP as instances were stopped and started). It has since been corrected (probably?), but as cakecentral.com is returning a 404 to robots on their homepage the best, most recent return google has was when it was misdirected.