Google produces 404-errors

Johannes Beus
While going through my logfiles today, I noticed that Google – identical to what Yahoo has been doing for a while – is apparently producing 404-errors on purpose to get the content of the 404-errorpage. I would assume their goal to be the detection of sites which send the standard-errorpage-header 200 so that they can deal with them accordingly. The logs will look like this:

66.249.65.145 - - [01/Jan/2007:15:09:36 +0100] "GET /mppwafdgqpulx.html HTTP/1.1" 404 216 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

They will always try to access random files in the root directory which are made up of some lower-case letters as well as the file extension .html

Johannes Beus

 Johannes Beus, Founder and CEO of SISTRIX, has been interested in the optimisation of websites for searchengines since 2001. In 2003 he started to regularly publish summaries of his evaluations and share his thoughts on the SEO-sector on one of the oldest German SEO-blogs.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (01/03/2007) at 21:02 PM

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