If you have a commercial site you want to be included in the Best of the Web Directory. It’s a good link to have and you’ll also get traffic from the listing too. Recently I’ve noticed submissions being rejected or live listing being placed ‘on hold’ by BOTW due to sites being down, but the sites are not down.

It makes sense, no site wants broken links so they get the check the response code of the sites listed for 404 errors. If the site is down BOTW contact the webmaster to ask why the site has been down and place the listing on hold.

But when going to the webmaster and checking server logs of the effected sites there has been no problems. What has happened is a broken image in the home page, or a missing image being referenced in a stylesheet. They return a 404 in the page load, even though the page loads up ok which confuses the checker that BOTW are using.

This cause a hell of confusion with hosting company’s saying the sites have had no downtime, BOTW saying that their checks says the site is down and so on.

So the lesson of the story is check that you have no missing images on you site before submitting to BOTW, to check use Live HTTP headers and look for 404 response codes.