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Google Sitemaps Tests Your 404 Error Codes
November 18, 2005
Today, Google unwittingly unleashed an entirely new service. It motivated thousands of webmasters to validate their error page code.
Back in September I posted about the importance of making sure that your 404 pages deliver a true 404 error code; many sites unknowingly (or knowingly) pass a 302 or 200 code instead. At the time, I wrote
In the health checklist of SEO, this issue isn't equivalent to a broken leg or clogged arteries. It's more like an old football injury that flares up at inconvenient times. The most likely results of a deceptive header code on your error pages are search query results that return error copy in the SERP description, and possibly an artificially inflated index count. Neither one will kill you, but it's something you shouldn't ignore.
Today, something strange happened. Sites that both fail to give the correct 404 error code AND that have Google Sitemaps files in place became vulnerable to a security breach. Anyone else with a Sitemaps account could look at the clickthrough stats of your Sitemaps-based pages. It's not akin to dumping your customer credit card database into the street, but it's certainly data you don't want just anyone to know about.
The moral of this story is not my prescience (I was afraid to buy Google at $85, after all). Instead, the take-home lesson is that today's C-list site dev priorities can become tomorrow's raging infernos - through no fault of anyone at your organization. No one predicted that Google would use a security measure that relied on your site spitting out a certain error code - why would they?
References: Although this story was buzzing at all the usual haunts today, I first saw it at SERoundtable, and as usual, Danny has an authoritative summary.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at November 18, 2005 11:35 PM
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