Forum Moderators: open
The reason I am removing them is they are no longer useful content for my page.
I have set these pages to display the data from the main index page. I have a small description stating that these pages no longer exist, and the reason why. I also went as far to give my users a form to fill out if they would like to see these functions come back to the site.
My question is since I do not have the regular 404 error being displayed, will this be considered illegal to google? Should I send the 404 header, and if I do that will it take my pages out of the SEs?
BTW great resource here! Even though this was my first google dance to watch, and I got killed, I am learning so much about how the engines work and what to do and not to do. Luckily I have not used anything the engines thought of as bad ethics up to this point, and I do not want to start now.
Thanks very much.
There are no problems using a custom 404, with Google or any other SE, that I know of, should be fine.
You might also want to look at some other 404 - related threads. There seems to be an underlying message that if you want to use a custom 404 it's ok -- but make sure the HTTP server actually returns a 404 error to the client. Putting a page there that says "404 Not Found" and making it look like a 'real' page is not ok.
You might want to check this therad:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Which is current as it talks about how to properly configure a custom 404 page in Apache.
[webmasterworld.com...]
