No 404's

[ericbrunson]

When we design a new site for a client that already has one I usually pull a fast one and make the 404 page their new index.html so people using old links don't get the ugly page.

However, I'm worried about search engines seeing the 404 response code and tagging the link as dead. Is there something I can do in the apache config to supply default content to a link that is not found *without* sending the 404 response?

 

[ericbrunson]

Well, here's what I ended up doing.

Is seemed to be the consensus of a google search that crawlers will simply see the 404 and abort, hurting page rank. I took each subdirectory and did a

Redirect /dirname/

http://domain/somethingappropriate

in the config. This should issue a permanent redirect (301?) which crawlers respect.

There were 8 old pages in the DocRoot which I just symlinked to a static version of the index, that shouldn't incur too much of a duplicate content penalty in the engines.

If anyone sees an improvement on this approach, please post.

Thanks,
e.