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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

It is about fallback placeholder which is not the same as default placeholder, but rather indicates that user did not configure his website at all. I'd say that 5xx is appropriate here. For example you don't want for Google to remember your website as "Apache installed" if its crawler happens to run nearby.

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That, and "Coming soon" shouldn't be remembered either. So why not have a e.g.

    205 Temporary Placeholder

or something along those lines?

Ironically, I sought to make a reference to the GeoCities "Under Construction" animated GIFs, and upon visiting knowyourmeme.com, they served me a 500 error on their landing page. Justice!

Is that ultimately not the same as 404 – The resource you requested was not found, so here is a temporary placeholder?

Browsers, proxies and crawlers might remember 404 longer than any status code that has "temporary" in it. See also the various permanent and temporary redirect status codes.

404 is the temporary code. 410 is permanent.

Have you ever seen a 410 actually used IRL? This has to be one of those that's pretty high up in the code rarity list.

I've used it for resources that have been permanently deleted, rather than the 404 that you'll usually see. I think it makes sense for that sort of stuff.

From a user perspective, getting a 404 after following a link that previously worked can indicate a couple of things. Like maybe the resource still exists in some other place, but they didn't set up redirects. Maybe it's been "privated" in some way, and I no longer have access to it.

A 410 makes it explicitly clear to me, that the resource has been permanently deleted. It'd also be nice if the response included some metadata as to when the resource was deleted.

It is still a 404.

You can serve a body with a 404, user will see the appropriate message and robot can safely ignore this page until further notice. Search engine will often retry 404 later and slowly reduce crawling if it stays not found.

A failback placeholder is a 404…

5xx is a failure to serve the page, which is not the case if a placeholder is served

I fail to see the difference.

5xx still returns content. 5xx can return HTML content. Browser will display it properly.

4xx codes mean client error. 5xx codes mean server error. Server misconfiguration is a server error. Client did nothing wrong.

The server has been configured without content.

Definitely overcomplicating things there. robots.txt already exists.

If they haven't set up their landing page I doubt they configured a robots.txt

This is clearly talking about default behaviours, so it'd already be there as standard. It's no different than expecting a different status code for the purpose of requesting crawlers not to index.

robots.txt deindexing a site by default is not necessarily the right choice. Lots of people are clueless about it and would never even think to change it when going live.

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