[thelist] Homepage as 404 Error
Stephen Rider
evolt_org at striderweb.com
Wed Feb 18 14:36:54 CST 2004
On Feb 18, 2004, at 1:37 PM, live4bacon at optonline.net wrote:
> 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.... But what about Root relative links off the 404 page would
> these be ok?
I use "root relative" links without issue. I believe the problem with
relative links in your 404 page is that that page can effectively show
up in any directory in your site... anywhere that there might be a page
not found, that is. Root relative links point to the same place within
the site every time, and are therefore okay as long as those links are
good. :)
> 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 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?
I don't know about technical issues, but this would confuse the hell
out of me. If I click a link deep in your site and end up at the home
page, I would assume that you (the webmaster) didn't know what the heck
you were doing. You _have_ to somewhere along the line tell the user
that the page they were looking for was not found. Maybe do a
ten-second auto-forward? A page that says "File Not Found. You will
be redirected to our homepage in ten seconds", and then does it? That
seems like a somewhat workable compromise with your boss. Really
though, the 404 should link to the Site Map (you _do_ have a site map,
right? ;)
> In regards to the 301 redirect using .htaccess. Can you use
> wildcards in the 301 line? (we have moved the site content from
> /root/dir_site02/ * to /root/dir_site03/*)
From the htaccess tutorial at
<http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml>:
"You can also redirect an entire directory by simple using Redirect
/olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/
"Using this method, you can redirect any number of pages no matter
what you do to your directory structure. It is the fastest method that
is a global affect."
In other words, you don't need the wildcardt. Just do the redirect on
the directories. I have used this method with 301 redirects and it
works great.
Steve
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