Empty Redirect
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Back in September me and one of my few remaining friends from the Google Webmaster Help Group had a bit of a conversation in the comments on my post Googlebot Gave Up.
Somewhere around comment #3 I posted a link to a page that I created that returns a 301 status code but doesn’t actually redirect anywhere. Forgetting my overly responsible form of dofollow blogging, the link went live without the link condom approximately 7 days after I posted the link.
Google promptly crawled that live link and to my surprise I received an error I’d never seen in Google Webmaster Tools.
The detail declares it an “empty redirect” and clicking the barley discernible question mark will lead you to this page which let’s you know that Google found a redirect on this page, but it didn’t point to anything, so the Googlebot couldn’t follow it. Make sure that all of your redirects are valid and not empty.
I’m taken aback by the fact that even though I struggled to create a page that exhibited the diseased behavior I was hoping to show it is so very common enough that Google has a default error message for it. Unbelievable.
I still believe that is not normal behavior to loose your homepage when doing a canonical redirect even if for a while, and I find it odd that Google wants to keep this “empty redirect” hidden from it’s own crawlers with the use of “noindex,nofollow” on the help page. Oh hell, perhaps they are just funneling PageRank.
