[thelist] Homepage as 404 Error

[John C Bullas]

At 19:37 18/02/2004, you wrote
>Good day,
>over the last 2 months I have been re-designing a company website, today 
>it went live.  I have a couple of questions regarding 404 error pages and 
>301 redirects.
>
>(Our pages run on an Apache server)
>
>First off about the 404 pages I have read a where a few people recommend 
>using Absolute links (ie htttp://some.where.com) on the 404 pages so as to 
>not send spiders into an endless loop.   But what about Root relative 
>links off the 404 page would these be ok?

absolute links and absolute image references as  your 404 could appear 
"anywhere"

the .htaccess reference to the errorpage404 location  needs to be relative 
to get you all the referrer data etc, if you use an absolute the 404 will 
work but not deliver all the goods AFAIK


>Also the boss just wants to serve up the homepage as the 404 error page, I 
>seem to think that the SE spiders (as our current site is indexed) would 
>view this as spam

crazy as the person following the link will not know it is a bad one and be 
unable to maybe alert the "linking webmaster" to the fact?

studying your 404 logs might tell you a lot about whats happening in the 
background too...

set a redirect to the homepage after x seconds and don't worrry about 404s 
as a benefit to spiders

Fb

>and hurt our rankings, can you all provide me some ammunition to go back 
>to  the boss with on this, or would it be ok to take his advice?