400 appearing in search listing

SuperBrain · #1 (**permalink**) 10-15-2007, 01:42 AM

Hello,

I have a client who is complaining about a 400 Bad Request listing appearing in the yahoo search results. If you go to yahoo and type debtfreeusa then you will see in either the 3rd or 4th listing that there is a 400 Bad Request in the listings. The one below that is the correct listing for the site.

If you know anything about this please let me know. She is wanting me to get rid of it, or make it not come up reading like that. I think it has something to do with the redirect to the https, but I am not sure, and you would think that Yahoo would not allow those types of listings to show up because who wants to see 400 errors like that when searching.

kgun · #2 (**permalink**) 10-15-2007, 08:49 AM

Have you "googled"

400 appearing in search listing

or variations thereof

like

400 Bad Request listing appearing in the yahoo search results

or exact searh terms like e.g.

"400 Bad Request yahoo"

??

**wige** · #3 (**permalink**) 10-15-2007, 09:29 AM

The server is configured incorrectly. It is responding to a bad request (specifically an attempt to access a secure connection on port 443) with an error page, but the header contains a "200 OK" message, so the search engine thinks it is a valid page. Actually, that would be two things that are configured incorrectly.

williamc · #4 (**permalink**) 10-15-2007, 03:43 PM

Seems to me an easy and rather obvious quick fix, is simply to 301 the page in question to the page you want listed there.

**wige** · #5 (**permalink**) 10-15-2007, 04:30 PM

Unfortunately, this may be beyond a simple fix. The error 400 is generated because the link that the search engine found is completely messed up (you can't send a http request to port 443). The page being displayed is automatically generated, and needs to be overridden in the main server configuration - you may not be able to change the page if you are on a shared host. If possible the page that originated the bad link should be found as soon as possible and corrected.

SuperBrain · #6 (**permalink**) 10-17-2007, 01:45 AM

Thanks everyone who responded here.. I have submitted a help ticket at the server level to see if an admin can remedy this..

By the way I am using Ensim control Panel on a shared server, and I have full control over it so most likely I can make a change to it to make it show up correctly.

Seth

**wige** · #7 (**permalink**) 10-17-2007, 10:06 AM

Again, remember you will never get any benefit from this link - a server can not respond properly to the URL as written. You will still be best served by locating the link that introduced this page into the search engine, and getting it fixed ASAP. On a shared host, all your admin can do is change the header code which will remove the page from the SERPs.