Dynamic 404 error page and re-direction

[mark_roach]

I have a 2 domains which point at the same content (mydomain.co.uk and mydomain.com). I promote the site using the .co.uk name, the .com was bought and parked simply to prevent anyone else from using our name.

The trouble is some of the search engines have managed to crawl the .com domain (Fast in particular) and have now thrown out the .co.uk pages as duplicates. Since all my external links point to the .co.uk site, this is affecting my link pop.

I would like to get rid of the .com pages and get the .co.uk pages reinstated in the various databases. Do you think it would be possible to have a dynamic 404 error page which contains a meta refresh to the appropriate page on the .co.uk site ?

The idea being that a visiting spider receives the 404 and then removes the page from the index. Whilst surfers clicking on an existing search engine listing still get to the correct page.

[littleman]

MSIE5 will keep the majority of your viewers from seeing the custom 404. Perhaps a better approach would be to 301 them?

[mark_roach]

Thanks for the 301 hint. Added a coupke of lines to .htaccess and got it to work. Trouble is I also use .htaccess to translate a static looking url into a dynamic one. With the coding for the 301 in place the dynamic url gets returned in the browser address bar.

I need to work a little more on this :-)

[mark_roach]

This one seems to have got me beat. Any modrewrite experts out there care to lend a hand ?