Google Webmasters Tools was reporting a crawl error on multiple pages of some of my blogs. The error message was:
Page not found http://page_url/ps/rpc_relay.html
Some other folks who encountered this error on their blogs saw a drop in their blog traffic too. However, in my case, there was no noticeable drop in traffic.
Root Cause
In order to identify the root cause, I looked for any reference to ps/rpc_relay.html on my blog. I looked into the template source code, but it was clean. Then I looked at the page source and did find the reference there. Looking at the source, it was clear that the problem was associated to the Follower widget.
To confirm my suspicion, I removed the Follower widget and as expected, the reference to ps/rpc_relay.html disappeared from the page source.
Solution
In order to fix the issue and also retain the Follower widget, I replaced the Follower widget with Google Friend Connect. Basically, both are same. The only difference being that the former comes as a standard widget from Blogger and the latter as html code that needs to be added to a HTML widget on the blog. Here are the detailed steps:
- Remove the Follower widget.
- Go to Google Friend Connect (GFC) and login with your Google account (the same account used for Blogger).
- Click on your blog name (in the list of blogs) in the left hand navigation panel -> Overview -> Add the members gadget.
- If you want, configure the member's gadget to match the color scheme of your blog.
- Grab the widget code.
- Come back to your blog and add an HTML widget. It can be in the same section where the Follower gadget used to reside.
- Paste the HTML code from GFC into the HTML widget and save it.
After replacing the Follower widget with GFC, the reference to ps/rpc_relay.html was gone from the page source (except for one reference which was a comment).
Two or three days after making the change, the error was gone from Google Webmasters Tool. The blog was clean again.
The solution worked for me and I hope it works for you as well. Good luck !
Nice fix! Thanks for posting that.
ReplyDeleteHi there,
ReplyDeleteI did that like 4 days ago and still no fixing from google. The last scann was a day ago si I have no idee what to do.
Please advice!
Thanx!
@ gstan80:
ReplyDeleteCan you try to look at your page source to make sure that all references to ps/rpc_relay.html are gone?
If your page source is clean, then just wait for a few more days. I think it took almost a week for the error to go away on one of my blogs.
What is your blog address, BTW?
Hi again,
ReplyDeleteI have a normal blog with followers and the error does not show. :) for the one with problem I used a template.. donno. Anyway. After CRTL+F the only rpc that i found is: DOES NOT ALOW TO PASTE HTML IN HERE - DO YOU HAVE A YAHOO ID?
Nothing more. I olsi discover today that after hit post comment link iw was only expanded the comments and go to first posted, but nothing more. I fixed it by inserting a 1 raw code can't remember it.
Just give me the link to your blog. I can go over and take a look at the page source.
ReplyDeleteRIGHT
ReplyDeletehttp://resumewritingsoftware.blogspot.com/
I looked at your blog and it looks clean to me. The only reference I found was inside a commented out section (it's the same with my other blogs):
ReplyDelete/* location of rpc_relay.html and canvas.html */
So, just have some patience. Check back again in a week or so. It should be fine.
Let me ask you, are you seeing any real problem due to this error on your blog?
Well.. not realy.. I think. Is just that I thought that this way the blog itself will not show up on google searches for the keywords setted by me. When searching the whole blog link it replyed to me with all other places when I mention it but not the site itself. So that I did not know what to think.. What improvings should I do? Can you sugest some?
ReplyDeletehave any idee how can I make like a menu i.e. cars / boats / planes / that is clickable and takes you to different content?
ReplyDeletestill nothing with the 404 error
ReplyDeletehttp://resumewritingsoftware.blogspot.com/ps/rpc_relay.html
404
Hmmm ... I guess we cannot predict how Google Crawler works. I applied this solution to 2 blogs and it worked in both the cases with 2-3 days. Since GFC support is almost non-existent, we can't get an official solution to this problem.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that you don't have any friends in GFC yet. Why don't you just get rid of GFC and use something else like Facebook Friends? That should most definitely resolve the issue.
All the best.