So I was on a website yesterday. ErrorDocument404 Question
Looking to see how to get this done. Bounch back Error Pages to the Home
acimag
8:58 pm on Jun 30, 2010 (gmt 0)
Looking to have ErrorDocument 404 /
Work. Right now what it does it shoots me back to the homepage but the URL stays at the bad page that does not exist.
How would i get it to bounce to the homepage and clear the URL.
Any Idea's?
g1smd
12:01 am on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)
You can't.
The correct response is that the URL you requested returns the "404" status to say there is nothing there.
You could set up a redirect to the root - but that would return a 301 HTTP status code, not a 404 status code.
In any case both methods are SEO suicide. Google may well flag them as "soft 404 errors" in WMT reports for your site.
You should return a custom error page for your 404 error, not the root index page. The custom page should explain that the requested content was not found, and that error page should then provide links to the root, your main section indexes, and to any special or featured content.
To do it any other way risks having your site flagged as being "technically broken".
