[thelist] url question...

Jeff Howden jeff at jeffhowden.com
Fri Sep 30 11:27:08 CDT 2005


Matt,

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> From: Matt Warden
> 
> > From: Chris at globet.com
> > 
> > In IIS it would be possible to write a custom 404
> > error page that analyses the requested URI and [...]
> 
> This is how the old evolt CMS worked... except you don't
> want a redirect (that would change the URL). [...]
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

No, you definitely don't want a redirect.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> [...] 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.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

Actually, if you specify a 404 custom error handler using the URL message
type, then IIS will automatically return a 200 OK.

GET /foo HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Host: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:22:02 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You must *explicitly* set a 404 Not Found message in your custom 404 error
handler template.  BTW, if you're using a technique like this, make sure to
return a 404 Not Found for any request that isn't valid or you'll risk being
penalized 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.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

Considering how well indexed the previous site was in conjunction with the
page rank of many of the pages, I'd say it worked extremely well.

 [>] Jeff Howden
     jeff at jeffhowden.com
     http://jeffhowden.com/



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