Redirecting all 404s to the Home Page

404/301 confusion

[tama]

I've got a website with thousands of indexed dynamically generated pages. I've just moved to a new systerm with new SEO friendly URL's. Now I've got thousands of 404 errors.

I've been searching around WW for the correct way to handle this and unfortunately I'm just getting more and more confused. All I want to do is redirect all these 404's to the home page (provided that's not SEO suicide). Sorry for the very green question, but what's the best way to do this?

[milanmk]

If you are only getting HTML errors of 404 then you can try sending all of them to your homepage by adding ErrorDocument in your .htaccess.

ErrorDocument 404 http://example.com/index.htm

If not, than please post some of your dynamic URLs.

[Dijkgraaf]

I wouldn't redirect your 404 to your home page, that is a dangerous thing to do, as some search engines test to see what the 404 page looks like, and then not list those in their indexes.
What I do is serve up a custome 404 page, that has a link to my home page. That is much safer.

[caveman]

> thousands of 404 errors

For how long?

Me, if it were only a day or two, I'd still implement 301's from the old versions to the new ones (assuming the pages themselves stayed the same).

When it gets to 3 or 4 days it starts to become more dicey (depends a lot on the crawls), but actually I'd do it even if a few weeks had passed, and hope for the best...but the chances of success short term declline with each passing day.

Based on one experience with a site of ours, and one with a client. FWIW.

Love to hear other opinions though.

[jdMorgan]

If the new friendly URL can be derived from the old dynamic URL, then you can use mod_rewrite on Apache or ISAPI Rewrite on IIS to 301-redirect client request for old dynamic URLs to the new static ones.

It is important to only redirect client requests; otherwise, doing this can put your server into an 'infinite' rewrite/redirect loop, as the friendly-URL rewrite and the old-URL redirect battle it out.

Jim

[caveman]

Jim (or others), my experience w/this (i.e., where a wholesale change happened, and then AFTER implementation, it was decided to redirect the old URI's to the new) is only with a couple of sites, ever.

Any feeling for how long the OP can go before it doesn't help? Days? Weeks?

Months? Gulp.

[jdMorgan]

I dunno -- as long as the site still has old URLs indexed, and those old URLs still have back-links, the SEs should pick up the changes.

I tend to do this kind of stuff in advance --get it all ready and then throw the switch-- so I really don't have a good answer either.

The whole point of redirecting the old dynamic links to the new static ones is just to accelerate the rate at which the old links disappear from the search index. There may be some PR/Linkpop advantage to it as well, but most folks do it to prevent duplicate-content problems, and to keep their stats neat(er). Having 404ed those old URLs for several days, it may indeed be too late to recover PR/Linkpop on some engines, but maybe not for others.

I also agree with Dijkgraaf above. I sure wouldn't choose to point all my 404ed URLs to my home page -- or any page other than a custom 404 error page with a clear description of the reason for the error and text links to the home page, site map, categories index, etc.

Jim

[larryhatch]

I considered a custom 404-page but decided not to.

I'm hit daily by numerous spiders-from-hell downloading my site.
Half of those default to lower-case URLs, and most of my filenames are upper case.
The result? They get a jillion 404s, each with very minimal bandwidth. -Larry