[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
<<< * >>>
Madhu Menon
Webmaster, India.CNET.com
http://India.CNET.com
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