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Went Hot: February 13, 2008 - 9:34 am
Posted By: Harith 509 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.mattcutts.com)
Category: Google
We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog."
9 Comments
Comments
Saw related news of this yesterday and thought content was getting hijacked. Now that I read this I see what's really going on. Custom 404 pages "more than 512 bytes long" are not affected.
planetc1
Yes it sems there is a magic number :-)
"If you're a webmaster, customized 404 pages should continue work fine. If you want to be sure that users see your 404 page, make it 512 bytes or longer."
It's still just bad form to be stepping on web publishers toes, just like some cray home owner board telling you how your house should look, and how tall your grass can be.
For sure it would have been much better if it was an opt-in rather than an opt-out operaton.
However, here is how Matt see it : "I think the fact that users can turn it off (or not install the toolbar) and webmasters can prevent it - but it can still help regular users - is the big litmus test for me. I do think a regular user can benefit from better 404 handling"
I don't see the problem with improving the standard 404 page, it is far more userfriendly! And as long as they aren't stepping on my toes RE the custom pages, i'm all for it!
Google is only hijacking the default error page that Internet Explorer generates, and replacing it with their own page.
This is only news for webmasters if it affects additional sites compared to whatever IE has already been doing for the last decade.
well going with "we only hijack pages IE is already hijacking" is somehow better?
My mom never bought the "everybody else is doing it" argument either.
I have mentioned it before here on Sphinn, if I recall correctly. I like graywolf-MattCutts discussions. There is always something good or very entertaining coming out of them :-)
Here is one of graywolf's entertaining comments posted on Matt's blog today:
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Matt: "Feydakin, Internet Explorer has used the 512 byte threshold since 1999, so there's not much new here."
graywolf: Matt I know my mom never let me get away with "all the other kids are doing it" line and I bet yours didn't either so don't think it's going to fly now.
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