Ok, it looks like the Whitehouse tried to stop the whole [miserable failure] thing by changing GWB's bio page, and doing a meta refresh from one to the other. I would have actually thought this would have worked... except that Google is already ranking the new page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/)on almost all of the datacenters. For us webmasters, it looks like this means that Google is now treating meta refreshes the same way as they treat any other redirect... any thoughts on this? Or has anyone noticed similar behavior elsewhere? -Michael
They've been doing that for atleast 2 years I've noticed, as long as it's static. Actually I think it just notices the page is exactly the same and indexes it as the same page.
A meta-refresh will produce a 302 status code, and Google does seem to be indexing the target page now, treating it as a 301, but time will tell. I was trying to figure out what was happening here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=134362 But it got moved to link development. I thought it was clear what I was trying to get info on... Google changing 302/301 handling... Any idea when the GWB redirect was put in place, Michael?
Actually, a 302 (and 301 as well) is server side. Meta refresh and Javascript redirects are both client side. Status codes are not produced on the client, only the server. First I heard about it was Wednesday at Threadwatch. As to when the change was actually made, that's hard to tell. I have a site that G spiders the homepage 3-4 times a day, so afaik it could be hitting whitehouse.gov every other minute (way more links, so gets put in the spidering que way more often), and I have seen cache dates within 24 hours of being spidered. My guess is that it happened no earlier than Tuesday, since the [miserable failure] example is so often discussed that it makes it unlikely it would be missed for a longer period of time. I mean, it was caught smack in the middle of propagating. Had it been a few hours later, no one would have noticed. The new page is now #1 across all datacenters. Damn, be nice if my updates were picked up that fast. -Michael
I mis-spoke, I meant it can cause problems like a 302 hijack - see http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm#008-1 (Claus has posted that it may be fixed in his notes at the top of the page!) There are some good comments on Threadwatch... http://www.google.com/search?q=link:https://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html That page is a PR8, 2,760 links, external mostly. http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/ 4,630 links, all seem to be from whitehouse.gov, and is a PR9. Must have had both up for awhile, before adding the meta-refresh. But I also have to wonder if the refresh was up for awhile, and Google changed something recently... There is no cache of the original bio page. This will be interesting to watch through the next update or two.