went from asp to php, disable custom 404?

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went from asp to php, disable custom 404?

asp to php site integration. now should i turn off my custom 404 page?

Euphorica

3:28 pm on Sep 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hello,

I just switched my site from asp to php (with modrewrite, so it's .html now) and i was wondering if i should disable my custom 404 page? (404 page just redirect to homepage) cause yahoo has all my old asp pages indexed and non of my php/html pages? could it be because my 404 page is on rightnow? should i turn it off for a while? it's been like 4 months and google is fine i donno what the deal is with yahoo?

Thanks...

mincklerstraat

1:02 pm on Sep 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

One thing you'll want to do is see if your custom 404 page is really a 404 page, that it really is outputting 404 headers so search spiders know that the page is truly not found. You can do this with the firefox browser webdev extension, it's in the menu under 'information > view response headers' (the headers aren't the same as the <head> part of the webpage, at the top). If you have some kind of script that just redirects all non-found queries back to your home page, and doesn't issue 404 headers, this is not a good thing.

It's probably not really such a good idea to redirect 404's to your home page anyways. Take the time to see what the server software is actually doing by checking the headers, and make a separate 404 page with a link to your homepage (or if you're into scripting, look up some possible pages that they might have been looking for).