Comments on: This week in Bot Oddities

By: Alphane Moon

Alphane Moon — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 11:49:10 +0000

I have seen it too: fdfdkll.html. This is weird. UA was Googlebot, not the sitemaps bot, IP from Google Inc.

By: Corey

Corey — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:16:58 +0000

Manu, thanks for your comments. I am familiar with Google’s 404 tests, but they usually look like this:

domain.com/noexist_c5a1437d8dcd9bcf.html

The user agent is typically “Google-Sitemaps/1.0″ which is why I thought the fdfdkll.html requests were strange.

By: Manu

Manu — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:35:24 +0000

Yes, I’ve seen it also on my website.
Here’s a quote from Webmasterworld forum (you need to register to view incrediBILL’s post) :
“Google does often test sites with page names designed to deliver a 404 response to see how your server handle the 404 response.

Some sites return a 200 OK with some other page, typically the home page, to stop visitor bounce and Google identifies this so it doesn’t index the same page multiple times and possible make the wrong page supplemental. ”

Hope this helps !