[thelist] Error reporting to our site

[Bob Haroche]

Michele Foster wrote:

> It's not to find 404's on *our* site .. it's to find sites that
> are linking to us with incorrect links.

The basic idea is to use a script that emails you whenever a 404
results on your site. You can also comb your error logs for that.

I realize that the 404's in question aren't broken links on your site,
but bad URL's pointing to your site. My approach is that when this
happens because I've re-organized or deleted my pages, but external
sites don't know that, I set up a server side permanent redirection
from the old URL to the new URL.

On the other hand, when this happens because the external site's
webmaster just coded something wrong, or because it's a robot which
can't parse my URL's correctly, I just ignore it. If the robot
consistently generates such false 404's, I'll exclude it using my
robots.txt file.

Make sense?

If you're interested, I can share the coding I've used for doing this
using perl/apache htaccess on unix hosts, or using CFML on an NT host.

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Regards,
Bob Haroche
O n P o i n t  S o l u t i o n s
www.OnPointSolutions.com