Whats wrong with Mashable !! Or is it a CMS issue?

Posted on 03. Dec, 2009 by in On Page Optimisation, Technical Thursdays

Hello guys, welcome to Technical Thursday. I should say that today’s post struck to me by accident and I get into a small research to know about what happened. Well, I must say this post will be more Interesting than Technical.

I was surfing online yesterday and wished to test the redirection, backlinks and canonicalization of some web sites and how they optimised for proper SEO. I was suddenly got many differences in the “Not Found” pages of web sites. I first encountered this strangeness with my wordpress blog which made me to get in more with this. This might create a Buzz or go simply nothing. Whatever it is, it was strange to me and I wished to share about it. Yes, let me explain what happened.

Index.html issue:

Everyone knows that most of the sites, has the home page named as index. Hence I have tried to point my browser’s URL to http://www.novicebloggers.com/index.html. For my surprise, it returned a 404 page. Alas, that made me to worry as it can affect my visitors and can make a negative reputation for my site to the visitors. Here is what it showed me for http://www.novicebloggers.com/index.html

Image for www.novicebloggers.com/index.html

Image for www.novicebloggers.com/index.html

After discussing with some of my friends and my mentors who are good at SEO, I learned that all sites can’t have index.html as the index. Since my blog is powered by WordPress, and WordPress blogs run by PHP, I have pointed the address to http://www.novicebloggers.com/index.php which lead to my home page without any flaw. Since I got interested in this, I moved on to check whether it is only with my blog or with some famous blogs like Mashable.

Mashable surprised me more:

I then tried to access the address http://mashable.com/index.html and as I expected I got a not found page. But what happened I can see only traditional, old styled 404 page with no customisations. Whats wrong with Mashable. It has no custom 404 page? So then I tried to access this http://mashable.com/nothinghere which doesn’t exist at all. It gave me again a 404 page but this time, its fully customised. I am confused more but that makes me show more interest and dig into these things. As I did with my blog powered by wordpress, while trying to access http://mashable.com/index.php I got no flaws and I landed on the home page. This has happened with all the CMS I have tested. index.php files lead us to home page so I don’t concern about them.

Alright, so there are two types of 404 pages now in Mashable? I have decided to check the headers now. I decided to go with this tool to check this and this page of Mashable. As I expected, no difference, both resulted in 404 page. Though there are some server related results (which I don’t really understand) I can see both of them returning 404 as headers.

This things make me to take another way to look at these. I can see index.html and other not found in all the wordpress blogs showing their custom 404 pages or the 404 pages provided by their theme. But why not Mashable. It means Mashable is not powered by WordPress. A quick search in Google for What CMS does Mashable.com uses , got me this link and a guy has said Mashable.com is powered by a CMS called Converdge. I am not familar to that but I can find that its not a open source one. Now I started concentrating on Content Managment Systems (a.k.a CMS).

Though there are lot of CMS available, I concentrated on WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and the one making some interesting controversies, Converdge. I have added the server response and what the page displayed. The server responses obtained are by using this service. If I speak as “Traditional 404 page”, it means it is the same old 404 page like this one.

Traditional 404 page

Traditional 404 page

Results of Converdge:

Lets take the interesting part first. As I have found Mashable.com is powered by Converdge, I visited their site and found who others use their CMS. Media Post and Millennium Minds Project are the other two sites powered by Converdge.

I have added the image for each of the sites, what they show for index.html page and a page does not exist.

Mashable:

Image for mashable.com/index.html

Image for mashable.com/index.html

  • Status Code : 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version : 1.0
  • Showing: Traditional 404 page

And here is the page for that doesn’t exist

Image for mashable.com/nothinghere

Image for mashable.com/nothinghere

  • Status Code : 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version : 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page of Mashable

Media Post:

Media Post is another website powered by Converdge. Here are the results for it.

Image for mediapost.com/index.html

Image for mediapost.com/index.html

  • Server Header Return: 200 (!!!)
  • HTTP Version : 1.1
  • Showing: Temporarily down message. (Surprise)

And here is the page for that doesn’t exist

Image for mediapost.com/nothinghere

Image for mediapost.com/nothinghere

  • Server Header Return : 404
  • HTTP Version:1.1
  • Showing : Traditional 404 page

MillionMindsProject:

This is another site powered by converdge CMS. This site is different from the above mentioned. It does return its home page for index.html

Image for http://millionmindsproject.com/index.html

Image for http://millionmindsproject.com/index.html

  • Status Code: 200 OK
  • HTTP Version : 1.1
  • Showing: Home page of the site (good work)

And now lets take a look at its “Not Found” or so called “404″ page.

Image for http://millionmindsproject.com/nothinghere

Image for http://millionmindsproject.com/nothinghere

  • Status Code: 404 Not Found
  • HTTP verion: 1.1
  • Showing: Traditional 404 page.

Thus said, I have took a look at various other CMS.

Jumping into WordPress:

As I expected, WordPress doesn’t do any of the above said mistakes. It was cool displaying the Not Found Page. Lets a take a look at my favorite website Teenius.com powered by WordPress.

Image for teenius.com/index.htm;

Image for teenius.com/index.htm;

  • Status Code : 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

And here is the result for page doesn’t exist.

Image for teenius.com/nothinghere

Image for teenius.com/nothinghere

  • Status Code : 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

For other CMS:

After going through the familiar CMS, WordPress, I decided to take a look at sites powered by Joomla and Drupal. I found two of the sites powered by them and here are the results for them

Drupal – WFP:

World Food Programme is a website powered by Drupal and here are the results for it. Similar to WordPress, it showed custom 404 page for index.html

Image for http://wfp.org/index.html

Image for http://wfp.org/index.html

  • Status Code: 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

And here is the page for that doesn’t exist

Image for http://www.wfp.org/nothinghere

Image for http://www.wfp.org/nothinghere

  • Status Code: 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

Joomla – 4PMedia:

And a look at a site, showed Joomla too favors the custom 404 page for index.html

Image for http://www.4p-media.com/index.html

Image for http://www.4p-media.com/index.html

  • Status Code: 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

For a page doesn’t exist.

Image for http://www.4p-media.com/NOTHINGhere

Image for http://www.4p-media.com/NOTHINGhere

  • Status Code: 404 Not Found
  • HTTP Version: 1.1
  • Showing: Custom 404 page

Conclusion:

Having dug sufficiently into this thing, I can not see any clear results for myself. The following questions are in mind and yet to be resolved.

  • Is it a poor design by Mashable?
  • Have the webmasters at Mashable haven’t noticed it?
  • Is Converdge CMS has lot to improve with it?
  • The only difference I can see with server header check for http://mashable.com/index.html and http://mashable.com/nothinghere is the HTTP Version. What does this do here and why did it vary?

I cant find the answers for this or I am still searching for good solutions and to know why it happened. Please share your thoughts at the comments and if any of you know the reason kindly share with me. (This might be the post I have written with most words. The count has gone 1200+. )

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About Senthil Ramesh

Hello everyone, I am the author of NoviceBloggers.com, concerns with Blogging for beginners. Get in touch with me at Twitter or befriend me at Facebook

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25 Responses to “Whats wrong with Mashable !! Or is it a CMS issue?”

  1. Tweets that mention Whats wrong with Mashable !! Or is it a CMS issue? -- Topsy.com

    03. Dec, 2009

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeyalakshmi B, PractiseSEO. PractiseSEO said: Whats wrong with Mashable !! Or is it a CMS issue? http://bit.ly/4PWNnP [...]

    Reply to this comment

  2. uberVU - social comments

    03. Dec, 2009

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by PractiseSEO: Whats wrong with Mashable !! Or is it a CMS issue? http://bit.ly/4PWNnP...

    Reply to this comment

  3. Gr8inferno

    03. Dec, 2009

    I guess Mashable just don’t care, they always think their s*** don’t stink.
    good job!

    Reply to this comment

  4. Bogdan

    03. Dec, 2009

    Interesting Research.

    BTW, do you know where i can test a demo version of Converdge?

    Reply to this comment

  5. Tinh

    03. Dec, 2009

    I have not got this error, maybe at the time I read it was ok. Thanks anyway
    .-= Tinh´s last blog ..Site Performance: Check Your Site Speed Within Google Webmaster Tools =-.

    Reply to this comment

  6. King Sidharth

    03. Dec, 2009

    Very insightful research there, I must say!
    Just noticed it, and yes it could hurt things but not much as no one types those extra index.html character there. But better be safe then sorry right?
    It’d have been better if you included a possible solution. Here is what I am going to do about it:
    I will use re-direction plugin on my wordpress sites and similar Joomla! counterpart on my Joomla sites and redirect /index.html to main site.
    Great research, again! The best part – you covered other CMSs too.

    P.S.: One ‘!’ (exclamation mark) in title is pro, 2 are a bit too excited. Just a thought.

    Reply to this comment

  7. Sandesh Mascarenhas

    03. Dec, 2009

    I think Mashable are not bothered bout it……….. :)
    .-= Sandesh Mascarenhas´s last blog ..Make your PC faster and more security with Mr Fix =-.

    Reply to this comment

  8. Costa

    04. Dec, 2009

    To my understanding, there are 2 kinds of 404 messages. One is from your server and another one from the WordPress Theme that we are using.

    The customized one is the one from the Theme that we are using.

    If you type an address that does not exist in their server, then the “raw” one from your server will load telling you that the file you are looking for does not exist in their server.

    On the other hand if you are already “inside” that blog and you look for some post that does not exist, then the customized 404 page will load, informing you of the missing post.

    Though it can be configured, most, if not all webmasters do not pay attention to the 404 error message in their server.
    .-= Costa´s last blog ..Can Successful Internet Marketers Be Successful Bloggers? =-.

    Reply to this comment

  9. Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable.com

    04. Dec, 2009

    The main Mashable blog is powered by WordPress. There are some important server modifications needed in order to scale WordPress to this level, especially if there’s abusive traffic (like bots that constantly misbehave and try to download files that don’t exist). What we found is that by processing these 404 requests by our web server directly instead of WordPress itself, we significantly reduce the performance penalty caused by badly behaved user agents. In other words, generating 404 pages is actually twice the work versus generating a normal page (200 response). While we deliberately forfeit the typical 404 experience for images and other static files, we assume that generally speaking, the 404s humans generate (by mistyping a URL for example) will still be handled by WordPress and all will be fine.
    As for ConVerdge, that software powers only my.mashable.com, our online community. How it handles 404s etc is mutually exclusive to the core site.
    .-= Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable.com´s last blog ..Latest Droid Ad Mocks iPhone’s Beauty, Tiara Wearing Habits [Video] =-.

    Reply to this comment

  10. Dennis Edell

    05. Dec, 2009

    OK so they didn’t customize the 404 error pages, what the big deal?
    .-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Simons Running A Contest – Over $800 In Prizes! =-.

    Reply to this comment

  11. Vikas Gupta

    10. Dec, 2009

    Great, big and influential people are reading your blog!
    .-= Vikas Gupta´s last blog ..Nominate your blog for the avant-garde bloggies awards 2009 =-.

    Reply to this comment

  12. NoviceBloggers celebrates first anniversary October 13th | Blogging for beginners and newbies

    13. Oct, 2010

    [...] Mashable 404 issue [...]

    Reply to this comment

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