Yeah. I'd just leave it as a 404 in that case

PS - if you're worried about the crawling, you could always block it in robots.txt if you really wanted (but unless it's a huge site I wouldn't bother). Note - if you do go this route, do it carefully so as not to block all contents of the folder at the same time!

The short answer is that there should be no harm going with your proposed approach.

Longer version: I believe there are cases where Google has tried to crawl a directory like "/famous-dogs/" in your example purely because it appears as a sub-folder in the paths of other pages even though there are not any direct links to it. But even if it does crawl it, if you don't have or intend to have a page there, a 404 is a perfectly valid response.

In general, while there could be a case that it's worth creating a "/famous-dogs/" page if there is search demand you can fulfil, until or unless you do, there is no harm in it returning a 404 response.

In theory, there should be no difference - the canonical header should mean that Google treats the inclusion of /images/123456 as exactly the same as including /images/golden-retriever.

It is slightly messier so I think that if it was easy, I'd go down the route of only ever using the /golden-retriever version - but if that's difficult, this is theoretically the same so should be fine.

Hi James. I've responded with what I believe is a correct answer to MarathonRunner's question. There are a few inaccuracies in your responses to this thread - as pointed out by others below - please can you target your future responses to areas where you are confident that you are correct and helpful? Many thanks.

@MarathonRunner - you are correct in your inline responses - it's totally valid to serve an image (or other filetype) without an extension, with its type identified by the Content-Type. Sorry that you've had a less-than-helpful experience here so far.

To answer your original questions:

1. From an SEO perspective, there is no need that I know of for your images to have a file extension - the content type should be fine
2. However - I have no reason to think that a filename in the Content-Disposition header will be recognised as a ranking signal - what you are describing is a rare use-case and I haven't seen any evidence that it would be recognised by the search engines as being the "real" filename

If you can't always refer to the image by its keyword-rich filename, then could you:

• Serve it as you propose (though without the Content-Disposition filename)
• Serve a rel="canonical" link to a keyword-rich filename (https://example.com/images/golden-retriever in your example)
• Also serve the image on that URL

This only helps if you are able to serve the image on the /images/golden-retriever path, but need to have it available at /images/123456 for inclusion in your own HTML templates.

I hope that helps.

You appear to have the MX sub-domain also set up as an A record.

If you have a mac / linux you can run the command: host aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com

You get the result aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com has address 72.10.48.198

Where you should get the result "not found".

I think you want to delete the A record (though check the documentation of your email provider first). You should only need them set up as MX records and shouldn't need the A record.

You've done the right thing by setting up the redirect - which should mean that the pages drop out of the index and those links disappear. (Note that there is also an https error on the aspmx3 sub-domain - but given that you don't actually want it, I don't suppose that matters that much).

Hope that helps.

Hey Logan. Just saw this - sorry for the v slow reply.

As you might know we (Distilled) are working on A/B testing as well (I wrote a bit more about it on moz here).

From our perspective, as a well established agency, we have built our tool with agencies and experts in mind. We see it as a tool for experts to use (our consultants, marketers on the client side, and other agencies). I wrote a bit more about how split testing is changing our consulting work here - but in short I agree with you that consulting skills and client management skills are going nowhere.

As for Google's view on the subject, any tool can be used for good or bad, but we believe that if you approach it the right way, this kind of testing is wholly aligned with Google's goals - our testing helps build better websites that are more closely-aligned with searcher intent and so we think that the general approach is one that forms a great part of a balanced search strategy.