Site issues sensed by Google Toolbar,

Thursday, May 29, 2008

404 errors with default error pages

When a user tries to open your site with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message, the Toolbar will recommend an alternate URL to the user. If this is a common problem in your site, you will see these URLs in the crawl errors section listing of your Webmaster Tools account.

If you want to set up a custom error page, ensure it returns end result code 404. The content of the 404 page can assist your users to recognize that they tried to reach a missing page and give suggestions regarding how to get the content they were looking for. When a site shows a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer offer suggestions for that site. You can verify the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

DNS errors

When a URL holds a non-existent domain name (like www.google.cmo), the Toolbar will recommend an alternate, similar looking URL with a valid domain name.

Connection failures

When your server is inaccessible, the Google Toolbar will automatically show a link to the cached type of your page. This attribute is only available when Google is not explicitly banned from caching your pages through use of a robots Meta tag or crawling is blocked on the page through the robots.txt file. If your server is frequently unreachable, you will possibly want to fix that first; but it may also be a good plan to check the Google cache for your pages by looking at the search outcome for your site.

posted by Alenjoe @ 5:23 PM permanent link   |

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