Hello, This is Markus, of http://www.all-area-rugs.com (sorry, live links are not possible for me on this forum "until I have 10 total posts") . Today I received an email (entitled "no link present") saying that a particular page would not show coop ads and thus my site was taken out of rotation. The page listed does no longer exist! To make this more ironic, the page delivers a 404 which HAS the coop ad in there. I am not impressed. How is this possible? How come the software expects an ad on an old page that does not exist? Is it possible to get my site back into rotation? All 4000+ pages show the ads. I have yet to see a benefit from joining the coop adnetwork but I remain hopeful. Thanks, Markus
It based on the pages that Google knows about, so if Google still shows the page within it's index, it could be randomly picked for a validation.
Markus, You should be able to change the catchall 404 page to include the coop ads. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=59898&mode=threaded#post59898
My 404 pages DO show the coop ad. As a software designer myself, I would humbly suggest to not pick just any page that google knows about, but rather one that does not return a 404. Seems obvious to me.
Shawn, a google query alone cannot tell whether a page exists or not. One would have to actually issue a GET command on the page and examine its server response code. Maybe this could be a better solution than to just disable someones account without having checked whether the page in question actually still exists. Today I have received another email that my account has been taken out of rotation until "it has been corrected". http://www.all-area-rugs.com/rug/202895 As mentioned before, the page it complains about doesn't exist and is redirected to one that returns a 404 (and DOES have the coop link on it).
When my sites fail validation it is usually because a page google knows about has actually been removed. I have now taken to redirecting all pages I drop to my home page.