API Documentaiton - 404 - not found

Dingo_aus · May 24, 2014, 4:35am

This afternoon (Saturday Australia time) the documentation pages are throwing a 404 errror:

“The page you were looking for was not found. Please verify the link/URL or try starting back at our home page.
Home Page”

Is this being fixed?
Is there an alternative source of API documentation (not includeing the source)?

anonymous_user_89b5ed72 · May 24, 2014, 5:22am

I’m assuming you mean links in the search results?

Some of the paths were inadvertently changed so the search results are incorrect until Google Reindexed the pages. It’s easy enough to fix them if you need to. If you see RuntimeModules, EditorModules, or DeveloperModules in the URL, change it to Runtime, Editor, or Developer.

Hopefully Google will be fast at indexing them. Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience.

Dingo_aus · May 24, 2014, 6:58am

That is exactly the issue. Cheers for clearing it up.

anonymous_user_8943aceb · May 24, 2014, 11:12am

Isn’t there a way to ask Google to reindex a page? I’m pretty sure you can ask them to include an URL in their search. Not sure about reindexing.

EDIT: Ask Google to Recrawl Your Website | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

anonymous_user_89b5ed72 · May 24, 2014, 1:09pm

Yep, you can request reindexing. It still takes time though. We are talking about 100k+ pages here.

hard_code · May 25, 2014, 5:45am

When you change URLs you should always provide a redirect from the old url to the new url. Always… This way all the links people provide in answerhubs and on the forums still work in addition search engines know that the url just changed and search results dont “reset”.

anonymous_user_89b5ed72 · May 25, 2014, 2:39pm

I agree. We are very cognizant of this with the regular documentation, but the API reference is automatically generated so a change in some code somewhere can affect it without us knowing until it is uploaded. This change happened to be a reversion of a previous change as well. I’ve made sure everyone who needs to be aware knows that we can’t make changes like that without visibility and taking the appropriate measures to account for the changes. Arbitrary changes to the structure shouldn’t happen again, though if a class is moved in the source code it could conceivably result in the link to that changing and we wouldn’t know until it was uploaded.

anonymous_user_d4f7fb481 · May 28, 2014, 6:45pm

Adding a somewhat related note to this topic for others having search issues. Wasn’t until I read this that I realized the search was using a Google API, which one of my browser filter plugins block. So, anyone out there trying to search and only see the search header…well, there you go. Check any plugins that block 3rd party utilities.