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Speaking of little-known status codes: 503 Service Unavailable should always be used in maintenance scenarios. 404s tell users to delete the bookmark and Google
by currysausage 12y ago
Speaking of little-known status codes: 503 Service Unavailable should always be used in maintenance scenarios. 404s tell users to delete the bookmark and Google to remove the page from the index.
- chrismorgan 12y agoYou meant 410 (Gone), not 404 (Not Found). Also people should bear in mind that 410 should be used cautiously.
- sbierwagen 12y agoOn bbot.org I return 410 on robots.txt, for tedious ideological reasons. Doesn't stop spiders requesting it, of course, since that check is probably hard-coded.
- currysausage 12y agoI did mean 404. When people or spiders encounter a 404 twice, they will assume the resource is Gone (although a 404 doesn't technically tell them that it is, sure, sorry I didn't make that clearer: "No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.") A real 410 would obviously be even worse, but that won't usually happen by accident. When my server/app crashes and I'm working on restoring the configuration, in the meantime, it will usually show a 404. And that's bad.
- chrismorgan 12y ago404 does not instruct users to delete bookmarks, whereas 410 is the code with approximately those semantics.