Assistance with 301 redirect

Query regarding correct redirect for this issue

[Lorm]

Hello all,

I've spent some time reading through the forum but am a little confused about what I need to make this work.

I have a Joomla site that I've recently installed a SEF URL component on, this has rewritten the URL's nicely but a few are generating 404's.

I have been thinking of simply using a 301 Redirect to forward all requests for a particular URL (and variants) to the front page of the site. I believe this will be better than nothing as the URL's and the pages connected to them simply no longer exist.

An example of what is causing a problem at the moment:

www.domain.com/search-by/il/page-9923-5?cf_id=5
www.domain.com/search-by/il/page-2223-5?cf_id=4

I no longer have any URL's that have /search-by in them so 404's are being generated when someone vists the site with this url. Likewise requests for www.domain.com/search-by alone are being made.

I'd simply like to have any requests for /search-by (and anything attached to it e.g. /search-by/1 or /search-by/12/23.php or /search-by/li/ etc. be redirected to www.domain.com

I have written a few redirect rules but I am having some difficultly setting up a rule to include all variants of /search-by.

If someone could help with this I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

[g1smd]

A "mass redirect" like that will be a mistake. Google will flag your site as one that is "technically faulty". See recent discussions about "soft 404 errors".

If the URLs really are gone, the 404 is the correct response. The error message should be made more informative and link to where the visitor might want to go next.

[Lorm]

Thank you for the response g1smd.

The issue is there are some 2k pages with /search-by listed on Google et al.

You feel it is better to leave a well written 404 Page instead and leave these 404 errors as is?

Thanks,

[g1smd]

Redirecting 2000 URLs to root would be a very negative "signal of quality".

[jdMorgan]

The "really proper" thing to do would be to generate a 410-Gone server response, since you know that you removed those URLs. Then make a nice custom 410 error page, much like your 404 error page.

On my 404 error pages I say "The resource you requested is missing or has never existed..."
On my 410 error pages I say "The resource you requested has been removed..."

Other than that, my 404 and 410 error pages are usually identical. Both link to the home page, major 'category' pages, the HTML site map page, and the site search facility, as applicable.

Serving the proper HTTP response codes is something you should test very thoroughly, as these codes are a 'primary communication channel' direct to browsers and search robots.

Jim