How Can Google Give Me A 404 SiteLink

28 Feb, 2008  Opinion

So, eventually Google shone down on my little Internet Marketing business and rewarded me with some sitelinks for the phrase “North South Media”. I have been noticing this for sometime in Google Webmaster Tools and with each new option they proposed I batted down because the pages were no longer in existence or I felt they offered nothing that a sitelink should offer (please see the below image to notice my blocked attempts).

blocked sites in google webmaster tools

So how does Google repay me? They offer up a sitelink on a page that has not been in existence for months, since I updated the permalink structure of the Blog.

404 sitelink

Well why don’t you 301 that sorry ass’s page then, I hear you all shout at once.

I have tried believe me. First up is my servers non-response to my command of 301′ing the page. They tell me that its not possible as its hosted on an IIS Server with a php plugin. Note to self, Fasthosts are getting booted this month, for sure.

Then I tried various 301 redirects for Wordpress: such as Joost’s and Objection-Redirection but nothing, nada, still no further forward.

I’m pretty sure that I asked Google yonks ago to remove that link – in fact I have just run through the same process again with Google – telling them to remove links that are now vanquished from my site and yet again I’m denied.

my url removal requests denied

Its not really tearing me apart except that I like my site to run in the order that I demand, and if I want to pull a page then go through the proper channels to have it removed from Google’s index then why are my rights as the sites owner not met?

Anyways am I the only bloomin’ site in the world to have a sitelink to a 404 page – sure as hell feels like it. They can take their sitelinks and shove them up their …

Update
Now to get even more infuriating, Google Webmaster Tools is telling me that “Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site.”

Now, who is kidding who here! I have posted on Matt Cutt’s blog but TBH I’m not expecting a reply. I may try Google Webmaster Help and see if I can at least expect an answer there.

Update

Thanks to the guys who commented and helped me see the problem that was so obvious once it was pointed out to me.

9 Comments

  1. Page Rank » Blog Archive » How Can Google Give Me A 404 SiteLink said,

    Wrote on February 28, 2008 @ 11:29 pm

    […] admin […]

  2. g1smd said,

    Wrote on February 29, 2008 @ 2:24 am

    Redirects on IIS require ISAPI to be installed — which most hosts will not do and will not allow you to do either, as it is a security risk for them.

    All is not lost. If you have PHP then you can do the redirect as a header in a PHP file uploaded to the URL that is currently returning the 404 status.

    Your hosts are fairly clueless in their poor advice to you. I know that fasthosts have been asked about redirects very many times in the last few years.

  3. Craig said,

    Wrote on February 29, 2008 @ 4:35 am

    How can Google know those pages are gone when your server returns a “200″ status code?

    It doesn’t matter what it says in the HTML on a page delivered in response to a requested resource not being there, if your server doesn’t return a true 404 error code, for all Google knows, that error page is the page that was actually requested.

    As for your sitelinks being gone. It could be that Google re-evaluated all those pages and decided that 10 pages of “North South Media 404 Error Page” without a proper 404 maybe aren’t such good sitelinks and so finally removed them.

    Moral of the story, if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t go complaining about others, who just happen to be doing what they are supposed to do. ;-)

    Craig

  4. JLH said,

    Wrote on February 29, 2008 @ 6:53 am

    While that page may say 404 on it, the actual headers returned are 200.

    http://oyoy.eu/page/headers/?full=1&url=http://www.northsouthmedia.co.uk/wordpress/%3Fp%3D23

  5. Paul said,

    Wrote on February 29, 2008 @ 9:16 am

    OK, thanks for the comments, so having a 404 friendly page is actually resulting in a 200 page found result thus denying my requests of removal.

    Cheers for that. Couldn’t see the trees for the forest.

  6. Liam Delahunty said,

    Wrote on February 29, 2008 @ 10:42 am

    I have the same thing in that a site has sitelinks in the SERPs but none reported in Webmaster Tools.

    I think it’s because although the site links appear to me on .com & .co.uk testing via someone actually in the States didn’t display the sitelinks in the results.

  7. Preston Web Design said,

    Wrote on March 1, 2008 @ 9:14 am

    I get this all the time, it happends on my link building pages, im not sure but i think google actully takes the page out of its index. I may be wrong though

  8. Michael said,

    Wrote on March 6, 2008 @ 6:45 pm

    If you 404 page returns a 200 OK HTTP response does that mean that you can get access to your site stats at http://www.google.com/sitemaps/. I thought you would have got a warning when you tried to verify your website that your error pages were not returning 404 errors.
    I’m gonna try out http://www.christianswanson.com/search-engine-optimization/404-header-fix-for-wordpress-google-sitemaps/ when I get home.
    Looks like it should do the job - I think…

  9. Michael said,

    Wrote on March 6, 2008 @ 6:46 pm

    “mean that you can’t get” Sorry.

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