Astachoth@xxxxxx wrote:
Also, wouldn't it be a good idea to cause a "404 not found" page to
appear when someone tries to access a deleted WebRing within a
WebRing system. Currently, if someone previously ran a WebRing,
(which is indexed in a search engine), on a particular system, it
will remain in the search engine even after deletion, because of
the error page. The search engine doesn't realise that the WebRing
has been deleted, because a valid HTML page still displays.
Eventually, the search engines will become filled with links to
deleted rings resulting in error pages.
I have started to play with having my own copy of Ringlink send the
status-code 404 when trying to list a non-existing ring.
If you list the existing ring ID 'oceanliner'
http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/ringlink/list.pl?ringid=oceanliner
the server response includes the status-line 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK'.
If you instead attempt to list the non-existing ring ID 'wrong'
http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/ringlink/list.pl?ringid=wrong
the status-line now is 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found'.
(You don't see this in the browser, so you have to believe me. ;-) )
It seems as if Lycos distinguishes between URLs with the same address
but with different query strings, so this change may result in deleted
rings being removed from Lycos.
However, I can't help thinking of how other search engines may behave.
I can imagine that some of them does not distinguish between different
query strings, and what would happen then if an indexed ring is
deleted? Could it lead to list pages of valid rings being removed from
the search engines' indexes as well?
Needless to say, I'm not an expert on search engines, and I'd really
appreciate some advise here.
/ Gunnar