[thelist] what to do with dead links

Madhu Menon madhu at asiacontent.com
Mon Aug 21 05:35:53 CDT 2000


At 12:00 PM 8/20/00 -0500, Rudy wrote:

>coincidence?  right after my lament about links such as
>http://www.whatis.com/icejello.html suddenly returning 404 errors, i get
>this tip from the DUMMIES DAILY: Internet Search Tips service
>(http://www.dummiesdaily.com) --
>
>******************************************************
>TODAY'S eTIP(TM): Wiping Out Decomposing URLs
>When you run into a page that doesn't load and the
>message that smacks you is Error 404: Page Not Found,
>take action! Submit that page to your favorite search
>engine. This action is the cyber-equivalent of picking
>up a piece of litter and tossing it in a trash can. The

Except that it isn't always so.

If you have a custom 404 error handler (call it say, notfound.asp), which 
does something useful like pointing people to likely places where their 
article might have moved, the search engine will index that page properly.

I found this out at the last company I worked.  We did a total redesign and 
reorganisation of the site (trust me, it was required). I set up a helpful 
404 handler that started with "Sorry, the page you requested cannot be 
found. We have just done a redesign. The most likely place for finding this 
article would be... ". Altavista crawled our site and indexed the 404 page 
instead of removing the old one from the index. And it did it for EACH one 
of the old pages. So we had about 1500 dead links indexed. Sigh.

But then, custom 404 pages are a Good Thing. Damned if you, damned if you 
don't, I guess.

In your case, Rudy, Altavista would index whatis.com's error page.

BTW, I forgot to ask, why do you dislike IT portals so much? It's just that 
this is the 3rd "IT Portal" I'm working for, so I'm curious.

Regards,

Madhu


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Madhu Menon
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