Sorry JLH!  Our posts have crossed.  I'll leave it in your capable
hands!

Good luck,

Robbo

On Jan 15, 11:42 pm, Robbo wrote:

Thanks JLH.  I reported this to my operations team and they can see
that the server isn't directing the traffic correctly.    So, they are
going to make some further changes.

Will you be able to check again as user agent once we can make some
changes to the servers?

Thanks.

Thanks JLH.  I reported this to my operations team and they can see
that the server isn't directing the traffic correctly.    So, they are
going to make some further changes.

Will you be able to check again as user agent once we can make some
changes to the servers?

Thanks.

Thanks Robbo and JLH.

We just set our DNS to bypass the server that was causing this
problem.  It can take anywhere from 5min to 1 hour to update.  Can one
of you guys check our site as a Google Agent in about an hour to see
if this worked or not?

We think we have narrowed down the problem to this one server causing
the time outs so now that we bypassed this Google Bot should be able
to access us fine.

Thanks guys... i dont know what we would have doe ewithout your help.

cheers

ABE

It seemed OK a few moments ago.  I sent an http/1.1 request for
http://www.abebooks.com/
There was an immediate response with an http 200 code.

I have retried several times and the response is patchy.   I 'm
getting a mixture of 200s and timeouts.

Could there be some caching along the way?

It's 1:20am here in the UK so I have to get to bed.

I think the best thing would be for you to see for yourself at:

http://web-sniffer.net/

Robbo

PS I don't know what tool JLH was using.

On Jan 16, 1:03 am, ABE wrote:

Looks real good from here as well...hopefully that does it.  The HTTPS
version is still being indexed, (1 hour ago), so we should see if that
fixed the normal HTTP version soon.

On Jan 15, 7:21 pm, Robbo wrote:

Thanks guys! You are life savers!!

It looks like the problem has been solved for now.  Our sitemap is
being consumed and there are no more 404 errors being reported.

Now we need to get our homepage re-indexed.  Do you guys know of a
quick way to get back into the index?  Do you think we will be
penalized for the 404 errors?

Right now Google doesn't even think or homepage exists.

There's no penalty for 404s its just a normal part of the web.

Your home page should be indexed as most pages on the site link to it,
however they already have a copy of it indexed as the HTTPS version.
They may figure it out in some time, as they should, to inspire it you
could use a 301 redirect from the home page HTTPS version to the HTTP
version.

The problem with the site at the moment is that the use of relative
urls in the code, for example your internal links look like:

<a href="/docs/Textbooks/">Textbooks</a>

instead of an absolute location like:

<a href="http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Textbooks/">Textbooks</a>

So if someone lands on your site, crawlers and humans alike, in the
https version, their next click will also be the HTTPS version.  Using
absolute URLS with the HTTP in there, or at least a base reference
would get them off of the secure layer and back onto standard HTTP.

Right now, google has filtered out your regular homepage for the HTTPS
version, the 301 redirect will take care of that.  Perhaps waiting and
hoping will also, but I wouldn't rely to heavily on it.

On Jan 16, 11:02 am, ABE wrote:

Thanks guys! You are life savers!!

It looks like the problem has been solved for now.  Our sitemap is
being consumed and there are no more 404 errors being reported.

Now we need to get our homepage re-indexed.  Do you guys know of a
quick way to get back into the index?  Do you think we will be
penalized for the 404 errors?

Right now Google doesn't even think or homepage exists.

I'm beginning to think ABE is a robot who's record is skipping.

On Jan 16, 11:25 am, ABE wrote:

Thanks guys! You are life savers!!

It looks like the problem has been solved for now.  Our sitemap is
being consumed and there are no more 404 errors being reported.

Now we need to get our homepage re-indexed.  Do you guys know of a
quick way to get back into the index?  Do you think we will be
penalized for the 404 errors?

Right now Google doesn't even think or homepage exists.

No I am real... i dont know why it keeps repeating my posts :)

Looks like you're redirecting the secure version now and.....the home
page is indexed.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:a45UyJnbH8wJ:www.abebooks.com/+s...

Problem solved?

On Jan 16, 11:48 am, ABE wrote:

Yeah,

With your help we were able to pinpoint what the problem was and
yesterday (after eliminating the problem Tuesday night) our homepage
got indexed.

You were of great help during this and i dont know what we would have
done without you!  This has also been a great learning experience for
myself and our company

Thanks again for all the help!

Cheers

Wow, it's great watching you guys attack problems like this and
figuring out what could be causing them! I love being on this
team :-).

John

I agree John,

I was very pleasantly surprised at the level of knowledge of everyone
helping me and what was even more impressive was how quickly I got
responses to my questions.

again,...great job guys