Well, In IIS, this was stupidly easy to fix. Go to
WWW Service Master Properties,
Home Directory tab,
Configuration
Find the .taf extension for the dll and exe and double click
Check the box "Check if file exists"
hit Apply
Now all taf files default to the 404 Object not found when the taf is missing.
Steve,
Exactly the problem. Google spider will follow the redirect and end
up with a 200 Object found. I need it to end up with a 404 Object
not found. If you use a header checker, you will see what I mean.
I do a lot of SEO and it's funny that this hasn't come up before. I
have lots of taf files that no longer exist getting page rank from
G. The only way G will remove a page is when the object can't be
found anymore. The problem is that the object IS found and Googlebot
crawls the default witango page. What happens next is that the dupe
content penalty kicks in which downgrades you results in the SERPs
for having multiple pages with the same content. In other words, it
looks like you are trying to keyword stuff your site.
I guess the only recourse is to change the error file in witango to
meta-refresh to an html page that doesn't exist. The problem with
this is that if you have multiple sites (I have around 50), all the
refreshes will ahve to go to just one domain.
mmm....perplexing
Can you write you own header info on an html doc? I am not very
familiar with header stuff and what can and cannot be done.
Bill,
Is that giving the correct message to the search engine spider? That the
page has permanently moved and to adjust the link accordingly?
Thanks
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Conlon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 1:25 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Witango-Talk: 404 Object Not Found
That's what it should do
index.html returns 301 telling the user agent to fetch default.taf
default.taf is there, and returns 200
On Thursday, July 14, 2005, at 11:11 AM, Fogelson, Steve wrote:
First turn on a sniffer.
Try http://www.reedssports.com/index.html, you will see it redirects to
http://www.reedssports.com/default.taf
The sniffer shows a 301, ends with a 200. That's why I am not sure it is
working correctly.
Steve Fogelson
Internet Commerce Solutions
-----Original Message-----
From: Fogelson, Steve [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 1:00 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: 404 Object Not Found
I am trying to do the same thing and I believe it is working, but not
positive.
On IIS admin for the site, I assign a taf (404.taf) to the 404
Custom Error.
I set it to a Message Type of "URL" and the URL path to
"/404/404north.taf".
In 404.taf I check for the URL and redirect as I see fit, but I use the
following tag to assign the header:
<@assign request$httpHeader "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Permanently<@CRLF>Location:
http://<@domain>/<@var request$url
encoding=none><@crlf><@userreferencecookie><@crlf>">
Let me know what you or anyone else thinks.
Steve Fogelson
Internet Commerce Solutions
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 12:45 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Witango-Talk: 404 Object Not Found
Hi Bill,
Thanks for answering.
A question or two if you please...
I am running IIS5 on a Win2k server. In order to do redirects, the
files have to already exist. I was hoping for something a bit more
elegant then this. We are talking of hundreds of files.
What I am looking for is whether it is possible to have the server
return the proper 404 rather then Witango when the application file
is missing. Not sure if this can be done.
When you say "... have your witango error handler send the
appropriate code," I am not sure what you mean nor how to do this. I
am wondering if anyone has attempted this before in Windoze and what
steps I need to take to return proper headers when files aren't found.
Thanks!
Presumably you have an error trap for Witango Main Error 3 (file not
found) that displays your error page. The error page is a valid
page so it should return 200 OK.
>>
You need to have your web server return a 404 Not Found, 302
Redirect, or 301 Moved in response to these requests, before the
Witango error handler is invoked. See apache mod_rewrite.
Or have your witango error handler send the appropriate code.
bill
On Thursday, July 14, 2005, at 08:18 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
I know this has come up before, but I need a little help.
I redid a site and all the taf file names have been changed. I
wanted to use the Google URL removal tool to get rid of the old
taf files. They are still being crawled by Google but all the
links end up pointing to the default Witango error page. In fact,
after years of using Witango, I have noticed that Google will keep
crawling these pages because, according to Google, they still
exist and return as 200 Object Found pages. On 40 websites, I have
many of these links that are still being indexed by Google and I
want to clean up all the sites and remove the dead URLS. Google
requests that all pages listed for removal be a 404 page. In
otherwords, a true Object Not Found page. I did a header check on
one of the dead URLs and have found that Witango treats the error
page as a 200 Object Found. Is there any way to change the header
info and have Witango treat these pages as a 404 pages?
Eventually, Google will drop them if I could figure this one out.
Thanks.
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