jmichaels - 5:06 am on Oct 6, 2009 (gmt 0)

I wanted to reply, and say thank you for all your input, and try to address most of what was asked.

As to why an error doc can return a 200, I found that info here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
That was the behavior I was seeing as well.

Why I wanted to 301 everything back to the home page? This is an old site, 45 pages to it, in an old programming language. It could not easily be ported, so I ripped the pages out with a http downloader. The downloader massaged the html and links to new pages, so the site worked. However, it used to work in page=1 format, where now that was page_random.html.

I did not much care about the SEO aspects of this site, so all the 404's were to go to the /index.html page. Google and the rest could pick up on the new named pages as they see fit.

@jd01 thanks for the suggestions, hope that clears up some of the issues I brought up. And yes, the reason I was getting the busted images on the error doc was that the resources were all relative. This is how the http downloader did it's work. Not a big deal, I was torn to even try to keep the site alive, so for all 404's to hit the home page, was good enough.

I ended up doing it the right way. I set a 404 page, made it simple. I then created about 50 rules for each of the pages, to send them to the correct new pages. It took about a hour, but the site does now work correct, and google will now what to do when it hits the old page=x based url's

Thanks for the suggestions.