How do I fix 608's please?

[SussexChef83]

Hi,

I'm on the free trial and finding it very useful I've fixed all my 301's. but now I have a load of 608's. I don't no what this is!

I feel like I've cured herpes only to get gonorrhea! can any one help. I have 41 608's which is more than the 301's I had. I hope they are non-related!

I won't bore you with the whole list but some of the url's are:

Error Code 608: Page not Decodable as Specified Content Encoding

http://sussexchef.com/catering-at-mr-mrs-currys-50th-wedding-anniversary/guestsarrive----608

Error Code 608: Page not Decodable as Specified Content Encoding

http://sussexchef.com/funeral-catering/picture4-2----608

Error Code 608: Page not Decodable as Specified Content Encoding

http://sussexchef.com/wedding-venues

[Dr-Pete]

Weird... yeah, under normal operations, output buffering shouldn't be on. There probably are legitimate uses for it for more complex sites, but not as a default option.

[joaocaetanojc]

Hello folks

I've read this post when I had this 608 issue. But I couldn't figure out what the problem was.
So I'm here to share what was my problem.

I used PHP and my website had this buffering option  "ob_start()" 
Since I wasn't really using it, I removed it and any other buffering option and the problem stopped.

Hope it helps

[SussexChef83]

Hi All

So after calling Godaddy a second time I got through to a guy that suggested i go in to wordpress, go to permalinks and select a setting other than the one that was already selected and click publish. then select the one it was on previously and click publish.

It fixed all the problems instantly.

I just thought I'd share this incase anyone else has this problem and searches the forum for 608's in the future.

All the best and thanks for your help

Ben

[SussexChef83]

Hi

Yes the site is behaving really badly in windows explorer and fire fox, chrome seams to adjust it almost instantly though.

[SussexChef83]

Thanks Dr Pete.

I'm toying with the thought of moving to a new theme so may leave it for now. other issues are my site maps, I'm using plugins to do this but google webtools doesn't like them. But I guess that's something to for me to research further.

Thanks again

[Dr-Pete]

I will add that it's entirely possible that this is a minor, if odd, problem, and Google is crawling the pages fine. You seem to be indexed properly. Fixing it is a nice-to-have, but I doubt it would be worth a big investment unless you've got other issues that need fixing.

[Dr-Pete]

Do you know what kind of hosting you're running with GoDaddy? Is it Apache, Windows, etc.? I used to do some hosting with them, and I'm trying to remember where that would be set. It depends completely on the web server, though.

[SussexChef83]

Hi Dr

It's amazing how much advice you get on the moz forum. I basicly ditched my developer and subscribed to Moz instead. I called go daddy but they couldn't recreate the problem their end, I even emailed your reply and they still couldn't help.

I'll take a look around the server settings soon and see if I can figure it out. If I can't can any one recommend a web developer? The last too I've had moved on to other things.

Thank you all for your help so far, it's most kind of you!

Ben

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, this is a server-side issue, so the fix is completely different depending on your setup. Basically, the server is trying to compress your pages, most likely (using something like Gzip), and the settings are probably wrong. So, the final encoding isn't quite right.

At first, I was going to say that our crawler might just be finicky on this one, but when I try to load these pages on Google Chrome, I get a temporary error, after which the page loads. This definitely could be causing you some problems.

I tried to check out your setup with BuiltWith, but it's actually choking on the Gzip errors, too:

http://builtwith.com/sussexchef.com

Step 1 might be to just shut the compression/encoding off, and then try to work out the settings. You're probably going to have to pull in your hosting company and/or developer.

[SussexChef83]

Hi, Yeah, us brits have a way of getting points across.

thanks for your responce. Moz says :

608 Home page not decodable as specified Content-Encoding

The server response headers indicated the response used gzip or deflate encoding but our crawler could not understand the encoding used.

To resolve 608 errors, fix your site server so that it properly encodes the responses it sends.

The problem is that I don't understand the issue, so I have no idea how to fix it!

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey SussexChef83!!

LOL "I feel like I've cured herpes only to get gonorrhea!"THAT is some funny stuff!!

Check out this article from Moz about HTTP errors in Crawl Reports.

http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics/errors-in-crawl-reports

Not sure if this provides you any real help for you or if it just diagnoses the gonorrhea in detail. Basically what I gather is that you need to encode the responses your site is sending in a different way than you currently have set. Hope this helps!!