[saagarjha]

> Other things were weirder, like this old post being soft recognized as a 404 Not Found response. My web server is properly configured and quite capable of sending correct HTTP response codes, so ignoring standards in that regard is just craziness on Google's part.

I've noticed Google does this when you don't seem to have a lot of content on the page. I think it "guesses" that short pages are poorly-marked 404s.

[SquareWheel]

That's right. Really empty pages that serve a 200 are recognized as "soft 404s". The idea is to detect error pages that are erroneously serving 200 instead.

It's usually pretty good about detecting actual errors, but I've seen a false positive here and there.

[pixl97]

Welcome to the modern internet

"Your page didn't contain 5Mb of Javascript, this must be an error as no one could possibly convey useful information to humans with less data"

Anti-patterns, anti-patterns everywhere.

[FabHK]

Indeed. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment comes in at 2MB, obviously that can't contain anything insightful.

And then I find myself looking at the website of a restaurant or event space, and need just a phone number or opening hours or so - maybe 10 bytes of actual information - and am buried in mountains of useless blather and "design" and ads and trackers and assorted other random rubbish.

[trickstra]

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2019/04/19/its-better-with-jav...

[SquareWheel]

Content means on-page content. Scripts and other assets have no effect here.

[acct1771]

It's almost like they should queue these into a human-reviewed dashboard before, yknow, being wrong.

The "world's information store", or whatever their altruist goal was that fooled people, is certainly disorganized and untrustworthy these days.

[SquareWheel]

They do... they add them to Search Console, the dashboard for webmasters.

[a1369209993]

I think that's why acct1771 used the word "before", rather than "after", there.