WebProNews

Tag: Errors

  • Cutts On 404s Vs. 410s: Webmasters Shoot Often Themselves In The Foot

    Google’s latest Webmaster Help video, unlike the one before it, is very webmaster oriented. In it, Matt Cutts discusses how Google handles 404s versus how it handles 410s.

    “Whenever a browser or Googlebot asks for a page, the web server sends back a status code,” he says. ‘200 might mean everything went totally fine. 404 means the page was not found. 410 typically means ‘gone,’ as in the page is not found, and we do not expect it to come back. So 410 has a little more of a connotation that this page is permanently gone. So the short answer is that we do sometimes treat 404s and 410s a little bit differently, but for the most part, you shouldn’t worry about it. If a page is gone, and you think it’s temporary, go ahead and use a 404. If a page is gone, and you know no other page that should substitute for it…you don’t have anywhere else that you should point to, and you know that that page is gone and never coming back, then go ahead and serve a 410.”

    “It turns out, webmasters shoot themselves in the foot pretty often,” he continues. “Pages go missing, people misconfigure sites, sites go down, people block Googlebot by accident, people block regular users by accident…so if you look at the entire web, the crawl team has to design to be robust against that. So 404, along with, I think, 401s and maybe 403s, if we see a page, and we get a 404, we are gonna protect that page for 24 hours in the crawling system. So we sort of wait, and we say, ‘Well, maybe that was a transient 404. Maybe it wasn’t really intended to be a page not found.’ And so in the crawling system, it will be protected for 24 hours. If we see a 410, then the crawling system says, ‘OK, we assume the webmaster knows what they’re doing because they went off the beaten path to deliberately say that this page is gone.’ So they immediately convert that 410 to an error, rather than protecting it for 24 hours.”

    “Don’t take this too much the wrong way, Cutts adds. “We’ll still go back and recheck, and make sure, are those pages really gone or maybe the pages have come back alive again, and I wouldn’t rely on the assumption that that behavior will always be exactly the same. In general, sometimes webmasters get a little too caught up in tiny little details, and so if a page is gone, it’s fine to serve a 404. If you know it’s gone for real, it’s fine to serve a 410, but we’ll design our crawling system to try to be robust, but if your site goes down, or if you get hacked or whatever, that we try to make sure than we can still find the good content whenever it’s available.”

    He also notes that these details can change. Long story short, don’t worry about it that much.

    Image via YouTube

  • Dear Pinterest: Can We Talk?

    I like Pinterest. I really do. But, I have this fear for the old girl.

    See, there is a rule in marketing that goes like this:

    If your product is bad, awesome marketing will only kill your business that much faster.

    Pinterest is among the Top Ten social media sites now. It may be so popular right now that they can afford to float for a bit and not worry about the criticisms and issues. Maybe they grew far faster than they intended to and are having growing pains. These things happen.

    In the few days that I have been very active on Pinterest, I have noticed these issues, and had other pointed out by folks (i.e. women) far more active than I. If these are not addressed soon, Pinterest may find its market share sinking sooner than later.

    1. Frequent 503 Errors

    I had heard about them before I saw them. Apparently, they are well-known enough that Pinterest‘s competitors are making hay about hem and attracting away subscribers. 503 errors indicate that a server is down for maintenance or is overloaded.

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    2. That miserable iOS app.

    With a 2/5 star rating and comments like these, the app is a major hurdle that Pinterest needs to clear:

    Pinterest App Review” class=”aligncenter” width=”400″ height=”600″ />

    I have noticed that Pinterest is currently advertising for an iOS Engineer. With the kind of venture capital that poured into their company, that job search should be short. And it should be priority. Maybe someone out there wants to apply?

    3. Embedding bugs

    Pinterest Embed Box” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”217″ />

    As a blogger, I think the embed function on Pinterest would be a great tool. Except… it is buggy. I have to go into the embed code and remove extraneous stuff, insert line breaks, etc.

    Also, the embed code screen purports to allow you to change height and width of your embed to suit your blogs layout. But, it doesn’t work if you need to go bigger than the image Pinterest has. I understand that they don’t want images blown up so big as to look bad, possibly reflecting poorly on Pinterest. But, I’m not going to use a poor image. Pinterest doesn’t seem to want to give me a choice. You can go figure the proper ratios yourself with simple math or a ratio calculator. But, we shouldn’t have to. YouTube allows ratio editing. Pinterest should too.

    4. Privacy

    It is an oft-heard complaint when researching Pinterest that you can not make private boards. If Pinterest is to be attractive to a wide audience, that needs to happen fast. People should not be subject by default to scrutiny by family and friends who have followed their pins. And, this doesn’t just apply to porn – which I can understand Pinterest wanting to curtail. What about articles on AIDS, cancer or miscarriages? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to research and collect items, sharing that space with whom you choose, but not worrying about all eyes seeing it?

    Pinterest is on the verge of something big. They need to plug these leaks before heading into even deeper water.