TheMadScientist
msg:4533079 | 12:44 am on Jan 4, 2013 (gmt 0) |
A custom 404 error page is 'most correct' for this type of situation. If you link to key pages from it your visitors won't have an issue with finding pages if they land on it and a 404 error is the proper way to handle a page that's not found as far as search engines go.
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lucy24
msg:4533122 | 3:48 am on Jan 4, 2013 (gmt 0) |
It's intentional. They feed in nonsense parameters-- or, when really grumpy, whole nonsense URLs-- just to see what will come up.
Sometimes it's nice to make directory-specific error pages, so you can say things like "I am desolated with grief. The model of widget you're looking for doesn't seem to exist." Here you can even do it in the same script that processes the "page=" element. Just make sure any request for a wrong number returns a 404, independent of where the user physically ends up.
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Sgt_Kickaxe
msg:4533141 | 6:08 am on Jan 4, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Protect yourself and return a 404 on any page that does not exist. Look at it from a shady competitors point of view, there seems to be one in every niche. If the competitor spots empty pages being returned for urls then he/she will undoubtedly link to them in order to get googlebot crawling them. If Google gets a 200 code on an empty page, well, that counts against you and if you gather enough of these who knows how it impacts your rankings but it's not good.
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JesterMagic
msg:4533212 | 1:47 pm on Jan 4, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Thanks for the input. I guess the 404 is the right choice. Users would never get to those pages from my site anyways so the chances of them ending up on them is slim.
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