Some US Travel Docs help pages render fine but return a 404 status, preventing them from being added to Chrome browsing history or surfacing in Google Search results

Description of the problem

Several pages under https://www.ustraveldocs.com/in/en/ return a 404 status, even though the pages render fine in the browser.

Here are some example pages:

To verify, load the page in Chrome with a tab that has Chrome Developer Tools open prior to loading the page. Note the status column:

Alternatively, run curl -I from a terminal to get the headers:

# curl -I https://www.ustraveldocs.com/in/en/221g 
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Connection: keep-alive
x-amz-error-code: NoSuchKey
x-amz-error-message: The specified key does not exist.
x-amz-error-detail-Key: in/en/221g
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:57:47 GMT
Server: AmazonS3
X-Cache: Error from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 137bec9e1094fee1ab695b0040678dda.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Amz-Cf-Pop: MAA51-C1
X-Amz-Cf-Id: H_Hq94KnMeTyhkmOhArWeIMFBOnJ3d49leCHNWiNjDtUtChKyZzTxQ==

Impact of the problem

The Chrome browser does not add 404ing pages to the browsing history even after visiting them. This means that we can't use browsing history to locate the pages, which makes it difficult to find them. (Firefox and Safari do not have this issue).
Google also seems to not index 404ing pages, so these pages are not discoverable through search. Note how even after entering an exact url, the search results show other urls:
The Wayback Machine refuses to archive the page due to the 404 status:

Start time of the problem

The start time is not known. The problem was noticed by @vipulnaik on 2024-03-07 and continued to be an issue as of 2024-03-12.

Last seen date

@vipulnaik last checked on 2024-10-16 and found that the problem was still present.

vipulnaik / us-visa-process-issues