On 5/8/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/8/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
"Several users have reported being persistently unable to access nonexistent pages" is quite vague. Do you know what was the specific problem? Did they get a blank page? A niced 404? A MessageBox?
We were unable to reproduce the problem at the time, so cannot say more specifically than that it was disruptive and there were multiple complaints.
I do see that we're sending "<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />" on non-existant pages.. that should be enough to allow google to deindex a page. Hmm.
If you can find a specific example of a page that you think shouldn't be indexed that is getting indexed, please email me directly. It's either a bug on Google's end or some confusion about the proper protocol and both of those can be diagnosed.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an official company spokesman.)