Sorry, file doesn't exist and google

New Member Joined: Oct 22, 2005 Posts: 4

Google is listing links to modules on my site which haven't been loaded for over a year now, such as gallery and coppermine. I've tried all the "automated removal" features on the google site but no go. What I'm looking at now is the fact that if you click the link you go to the Sorry, file doesn't exist page. I did some test and it's looking to me as though that page returns a Code 200 OK, which therefore means that google sees it as a valid link and would never remove it. Is that true or am I missing something? How would I get nuke to return a 404 in cases like this, so that dead links would get removed from the search engines listing.

TIA

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

Well these things happen a lot,your not the only one.
What you can do is put this in your htaccess file..

Redirect permanent /old whatever http://www.yoursite.com/new-url.html

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:40 pm

Yea, but that doesn't really solve the problem does it? There's no new URL to direct to in my scenario as the gallery was simply removed from the site all together, not replaced. Plus, I don't think redirecting to a good URL is going to get the old URL removed from the search engine listings, not unless there's a way to make nuke generate a 404 when a Sorry, file doesn't exist condition happens. Did that make since?

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:46 pm

cy Yes you are perfectly correct.
If you wanted to take advantage of the traffic you could do as Hitwalker proposed and perhaps redirect to a sitemap or homepage or something.
If you wanted to actually get those non existant pages dropped from the SE index then you would need to show it the correct header response.

Hitwalker has a nifty tool for that or there are add-on modules like 'Diserror' which you can use to create your own customised error pages.

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:53 pm

Alright, thanks guys. I can redirect easily enough. I'm on hitwalkers site now so I'll look around there.

Just out of curiosity, where/how do you "show it the correct header response". I know what you're saying, just not how in nuke I would do that.

I may just take the suggestion of redirecting to a sitemap or something anyway but still wondering how to generate the 404 response just in case.

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 4:04 pm

well i had the same problem and it took me a month to convince google a lot of pages were removed or gone (that was because of my "going to the root" change)

HTTP return code 301...meaning.. moved permanently
The 301 redirect code tells the user agent that a resource has been moved and will never be available at the old address again.
All intentional redirects (e.g. renamed URLs, moved URLs ...) must send the requesting user agent a 301 header with the new permanent address.

As for deleted pages, often it makes sense to 301-redirect requests instead of sending a dead page error (404 or 410), especially when there is a page with similar content available on the Web server and other sites link to the deleted page.

Naturaly you can redirect to whatever sitemap or even your main site.
I did it all inside the htaccess and worked great,as for lost traffic or whatever you cannot do anything about that.

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 4:22 pm

OK, sounds like a winner. Thanks for the responses, now I have something to do for the rest of the day Razz

registered · Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 10:54 pm

You could actually create the module file and have it do a 404

Code:




header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

That may solve your problem, I don't know how Google will work with it or not