Thanks Travis,

I have discovered that for some users the initial page loads up to 3 times nearly immediately without it being visual.  It never happens to me or any or the browser/system combinations I use on remote machine testing - even if I match someones setup who is getting the problem, but there is no question it is happening.  This was triggering the robot message I was giving.  I don't yet know the cause as the typical culprits don't apply.  I relaxed the rule by 1 more load in 30 seconds, which is why you didn't get a message.  Am going to use someone's computer tomorrow that gets the problem to try and narrow it down.

Agree on the human testing.  Thanks for the suggestions.

take care

Hi Travis.

Thanks for the info re Screaming Frog.

I didn't white list your IP.  I just changed the number in my files to something else, which would already be unblocked since a day has passed.

The scenario you gave would be quite rare and wouldn't create a block because that requires everything happening in 30 seconds or less (and the session wouldn't expire in that time frame), or that the same IP address also tried to crawl my site with a bot in the useragent (your scenario with screaming frog)..  But yours and Max's experience is looking more and more like it is commonplace, and I'm the fool who hasn't known that's what's happening because I can't distinguish between you and a robot (which doesn't keep sessions).

All I need is to verify that I have a sessions problem.  Here's what it takes:

1. use a desktop or laptop
2. remove all cookies related to qjamba
3. go to http://www.qjamba.com
4. choose an option (restaurants) and a location (Saint Louis) and click
5. dont do anything else - just close out the tab
6. If your ip address changes, let me know when you do this so I can find it in the logs

In all my usage it keeps the session between steps 3 and 4.  It looks like for you and Max it doesn't do that, which means many of my users would be having the same terrible experience as you, for the 3 months since it has been live.  It's a disaster.  But I have to first verify that it really is a problem and unfortunately I have to rely on strangers like you who are experiencing the problem to do that.

If you just do those steps I promise we'll be done

Thanks, Ted

Massimiliano, my guess of your path was the most logical conclusion based on the fact that I have 3 records of the urls you went to on my site, and showing that the program didn't keep any session variables between the 3 urls you came to.  You first went to wildwood.  Then you went to the home page.  This implies that you either did that in a new tab, or you hit the back key, or you modified the url and removed the wildwood part to go to the home page, as opposed to clicking on something on the page.  Telling me I'm wrong at least lets me know I may have a serious problem to fix, but you are mistaken to think that this is a robot problem.  It is a php session variable problem, apparently, that none of my extensive (hundreds of hours) testing has ever had.

This is a serious problem unrelated to the OP and about 100 times more important than the OP that I was hoping to get some help with because it is very difficult to diagnose without feedback from those having the experience that you had with my site,. However, that's my problem I'll have to deal with.  I don't know if you just don't remember or aren't telling me because you think it is a robot problem, but if you do happen to recall the steps (or at least tell me it was all done in the same tab or you hit the back key) I'd appreciate whatever it is you can tell me.  If I can't solve the problem it probably means I'll have to shut down my website which I've put more than 4 years of my life into.  Seriously.

Thanks for your various other responses though..  Take care. Ted

Massimiliano,

Can you tell me your steps that led to that error?  It looks like you went directly to www.qjamba.com/local-coupons/wildwood/mo/all   and then  you opened up a separate tab and went to www.qjamba.com  and then either refreshed the home page or opened the home page again in another tab -- all within 30 seconds.  That's the only way I have been able to reproduce this , because it looks for 3 searches without any existing session within 30 seconds by the same ip address, and the home page wipes out the session and cookies, and those are the urls the db table shows that you went to, and in that order.

Normally a user stays in the same tab, so with the 2nd search will have a session -- but your ip had no session with each search.  And, normally you can't go to the home page from a location page.  So, I'm confused as to what you did if it wasn't like what I wrote above.  If you didn't do this then I'm worried of a serious programming problem having to do with the php sessions getting dropped between pages.

I"ve put a lot of time into this website and a ton of testing of it too, and just went live a few months ago, so these kinds of problems are disheartening.  Ironically, your experience is almost identical to that of Travis, except that in your case you must have moved a little faster since you got a different message.  But, it would REALLY help me to get some feedback from both of you confirming what I wrote or setting me straight if you did something different.

Geez, I'm so pedantic sometimes.  Just need to understand what this means:

<<or, you="" make="" a="" new="" page.="" it="" gets="" crawled.="" <strong="">Checking if it's indexed... no, no, no, no, yes?! That's how long it takes.>></or,>

How do you do the bolded?  site:www.site.com/thepage "my content change on the page" ?

And, you did say one can change and not the other yet the page really has been indexed, right?

THANK YOU!

Thanks for sharing that.  I was only kidding above, but obviously it's no joking matter when a user gets blocked like you did.

I just looked and see that it blocks when something/someone clicks 3 times within 30 seconds. EDIT: but that's only if it isn't keeping the session between clicks--see next post

I'm sorry, but once I know they have crawled a page, shouldn't there be a way to know when it has also been indexed?  I know I can get them to crawl a page immediately or nearly, by fetching it.  But, I can't tell about the indexing--are you saying that after they crawl  the  page, the 'time to indexing the crawled page' can vary by site and there really is no way to know when it is in the new index?  that is, if it shows as newly cached that doesn't mean it has been indexed too, or it can be indexed and not show up as a site:www... , etc..?

Masimilliano, thanks for your input.  So you're on of them,huh?   Good points, the last thing I want to do is annoy users, yet I also want to track 'real' usage, so there is a conflict.  I know it is impossible to block all that I don't want as there is always another trick to employ..I'll have to think about it more.

Yeah the cut and paste blocking is annoying to anyone that would want to do it.  But, none of my users should want to do it. My content is in low demand but I hate to make anything easier for potential competition, and some who might be interested won't know how to scrape.  Anyway thanks for your feedback on that too.

Well, I'm ready to test -- but still not quite sure how since I don't know how to tell when Google has indexed the new content, since sometimes it doesn't get cache'd and sometimes it disappears from the site:www.. listing.  I've read it only takes a couple of days after Google crawls the page, and can go with that, but was hoping there is a way to actually 'see' the evidence that it has been indexed.

So, while I've gotten some great input, I am somewhat unsatisfied because I'm not sure how to tell WHEN my content has really been put in the index so that the algorithm is updated for the newly crawled page.

Here's an example:

I get a 404 error for this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all

But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this:

site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all

What is going on?  How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache?

I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine.  This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google  Yet, no cache.

It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website:

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456

etc..

How is this normally handled?  Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors.

I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.