4 replies to this topic

[smallweddings]

Greetings,

I was just doing my daily perusal of my Google Webmaster Tools account and had a bit of a shocker
with 800+ HTML errors reported. I'm used to seeing onesey-twosey errors here and there, but never 800 + page errors.

In trying to randomly click on some of the error pages, they appear to be working fine now.

I assume this was a googlebot stop-over intending to check a whole whack of pages at the same time my hosting
company decided to power down the server and clean off the motherboard with a dustbuster or something?

No big deal and Mr. Googlebot will straighten it out next time 'round right?

Darin

[Randy]

If the pages are now working that's a pretty good bet. It's not a case where every page is showing an error, right?

If it's every page then I'd want to check a little closer to make sure the site hadn't been hacked or the web host didn't do something silly like block Googlebot from crawling. That's pretty rare, but it does pop up from time to time. If you want to check a bit closer for those you can always fake like you're Googlebot to see if anything funky happens. Probably not necessary though.

[smallweddings]

Actually on further inspection Randy, I've found that they all have an incorrect spelling in the url.

blahblah.com/blahblah.php?mode=venue_search&country_id=3&state.etc.etc.etc

is the correct url, but they have it as:


blahblah.com/blahblah.php?mode=veneu_search&country_id=3&state.etc.etc.etc

And the incorrect spelling was never put in there as far as I know. Either my sitemap generator had a hiccup, or googlebot
had a drink spilled on it new years eve and had a hard time recording the url when it came by for a visit.

Or maybe google has hired out automated bot tasks to humans or something in search of cheaper labor.
Darned expensive servers.

Weird.

[Randy]

I'd run Xenu Linksleuth against the site if it were me. For no other reason than to make sure I hadn't mistakenly entered a typo into the stream somewhere. If you have an xml sitemap definitely check that too, but that's a easier one. Open it, ctrl+F and search for the text string "veneu". Whether or not you find it in the sitemap you'll probably also want to either run Xenu against the site to check for a typo in a navigation file somewhere, or if you have SSH ability on your server running a quick grep search of the files that make up the site would be faster.

[smallweddings]

Thanks Randy. Low and behold, I've found it in the sitemap.xml and am now working on figuring out why.