Here’s something that doesn’t reassure you when you go looking for your favorite airline, as I did to check on a flight just now.
Poor old Virgin. Knowing the Virgin site as I do, I think it crashed around the time Googlebot came along. I find it crashes a lot.
Still, Virgin deserves some blame.
Want to go to the home page at http://www.virgin-atlantic.com? Sorry old chap, we’ll redirect you to
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/index.jsp
;jsessionid=G3yn299S9ThqVHj1gb8qD32B
2KCvGHkNy2fqhhhyRDFQFGF8Rv0b!27
5485668.
What happens if the dynamic back-end to the site crashes? Well, it’s either trying to redirect to a page it can’t find or Google’s trying to follow a session id link it had before but no longer works.
But shouldn’t Google be smart enough to see it’s getting a 404 error and not index a broken page. Yep, if it were getting a 404 error. But it’s not.
Try this:
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/index.jspdfdfdd
That page doesn’t exist, so it produces a 404 error. Or so it would seem. Rex Swain reports the page is temporarily redirecting (302) to the error page that says right on it, Error 404. Sadly, it tells browsers something different, a 200 found message. So Google says great — I tried to get the home page, you told me it moved somewhere else, then you gave me the page from its new location. That page was an error page, but since Virgin didn’t actually send the header code to say it was an error, Google merrily plays along believing what it’s told. And that description? Why’s it seem so nice? That’s the Open Directory kicking in to help solve some of the mess.
Richard, please, sort out the web site!
