Search Engines not respecting CFLOCATION?

Mar 07, 2009
I've been seeing some wierd behaviour from a local search engine on one of my sites; I say local, as it's a Google Search Appliance designed to trawl the ox.ac.uk domain. What I can't understand is what it doesn't seem to respect CFLOCATION's default redirect. BlogCFC uses CFLOCATION quite a lot, especially when URL variables don't exist, which is where I'm seeing this the most: Let's say I have a page which has: "foo"> "index.cfm" addtoken="no"> Which tells the browser to essentially go away unless url.foo equals "foo". Let's say that I've got some code in the remainder of the page that relies on url.foo - it then throws an error which I get by email. I've been seeing these errors, ONLY triggered by this GSA, which could only have happened had the page been resolved; I understand this is a 302 redirect, not a 301 redirect, but shouldn't the GSA respect the browser command of redirect and stop rendering the page? This isn't an error a human can throw! Why only this one GSA? Could it be a configuration issue? I'm going to try adding a cfheader to change it to a 301 redirect and see what happens... Any ideas welcomed...

Comments

Daver

Daver wrote on 03/07/09 11:52 PM

In the CFLocation add the statuscode so that it is statuscode="301". Ive never checked to confirm your comment that it gives a 302 but Id guess that it gives a 200 or 302 status code both of which are bad. If a search engine sees a 302, it will keep coming back for as long as you show it that.

Think of it as a guy that keeps asking a woman out and is never told NEVER but is instead told, oh im busy, not today. The guy thinks there is a chance and will continue to try until he is redirected to get lost.
Tom K

Tom K wrote on 03/08/09 12:10 AM

Yeah, you definitely get :
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
location: /your_redirection_page.cfm
Connection: close

According to firebug. So it seems I should be doing 301's by default in this case.

What I don't get is why this one GSA continues to render the page!
Azadi Saryev

Azadi Saryev wrote on 03/08/09 11:43 AM

have you tried adding <cfabort> after <cflocation>?

btw, the code sample in your post actually tells the browser to go away IF url.foo equals "foo", not the other way as mentioned in the post...

Azadi
Tom K

Tom K wrote on 03/08/09 11:49 AM

Sorry yes, the code example was just a quick concept :)

No I've not tried addeding cfabort after the cflocation yet..I'm trying to avoid going through and changing all the cflocations I've got :)

Write your comment



(it will not be displayed)





About Tom

Tom is the author of this blog and the brains behind OxAlto Design More ...

Categories

Monthly Archives

Links

Tag Cloud

coldfusion internet web-development misc music cfwheels railo drupal vps chchchoir mangoblog blueprintcss flex ipod mac demos flickr google hinkseystudio itunesu jquery wallpapers wordpress

Feeds