404 and spiders

Will a brief 404 effect how spiders see the site?

[Strange]

We are currently in development of ner material for our site. When viewing the new pages and links in IE or Netscape, all the links appear to work fine. However, when checking these same links with the text browser Lynx, a 404 error appears for approximatly 5 seconds then redirects to the selected page. Will this prevent spiders such as googlebot from indexing these pages?

[jeremy goodrich]

If the http response from the server is 404, then the files will not get properly indexed by any search engine, since that means the file is "temporarily gone" according to the http rft ;)

My recommendation would be to issue a 301 redirect to the new material, then most (if not all) spiders will follow the link.