[thelist] url question...

[Matt Warden]

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Chris at globet.com wrote:
> In IIS it would be possible to write a custom 404 error page that
> analyses the requested URI and then redirects to the desired page. Thus,
> the organisation could give Foobar Associates the URI
> http://www.xxxxxxx.com.au/distributors/foobarassociates.php to
> disseminate. This page would not actually exist, so the 404 error page
> would be called. The script on this page would then redirect to
> http://www.xxxxxxx.com.au/view_distributor.php?id=22&fbassoc - the
> correct page. I'm not sure that this is wholly desireable, as this would
> pollute the server logs. I don't know offhand of another easy way to do
> this, but I have a vague memory that Apache has a much more elegant way
> to do this. I could not say how this affects search engine rankings, but
> the original post suggested that it was more an issue of giving the
> distributors a friendly URL than optimising for search engines.

This is how the old evolt CMS worked... except you don't want a
redirect (that would change the URL). You should know that it is
sometimes tricky to get around the fact that your server will be
sending the client a 404 status code. This can have effects on your
site's indexing by search engines.

I think we ended up setting an additional Status: header, but I'm not
sure if we ever measured how well this worked.

- --
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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