404's redirected to?

does this cause problems with SE's?

[Terabytes]

ok....lets say I redirect all 404 requests back to my index page...(or any page for that matter)

now...if I remove any already indexed pages....and the SE comes back to index the missing page....it will receive the index page (or my other page)...via the 404 redirect...

will that page basically "stay alive" in the SE's indexed wrongly? (the missing page on "red widgets" is now the index page as far as the SE is concerned...)

if that's so...then what would be the proper way to direct 404's....to stop this nasty loop of reindexing?

You Guys ROCK!

[Herb75]

i suggest making a custom 404 (that looks like every other page of your site) alerting people that the page could not be found and link:

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most people who use the www are idiots and redirecting them to your home page will confuse them.

as far as the SE's are concerned they should realize the page is gone.

[tedster]

No matter what kind of error page you return, make sure that the server is actually returning a 404 code in the http header. This will stop any indexing "loop" with the search engines.