Trying to redirect a line with no extension

[chopin2256]

My first question is, would it be better to give custom 404 error pages, or to redirect error pages to the homepage or sitemap? I have tons of 404's, probably in the 10,000's. This is due to an old forum, which still gets spidered heavily by yahoo. Yahoo will not spider my new forum. My guess is becuase Yahoo may not be as intelligent to figure out I moved. Google figured it out.

My second question is, how can I redirect pages that look like this?

http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/connection?[e-mail]0^0@.ee6d35b
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/connection?13@83.79YpaPWjjSC^2@.ee6eebd
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/connection?13@83.79YpaPWjjSC^2@.ee6eb86

and so on

note that the end extention "ee6e***" means that ee6e is constant while the following three stars *** can be any combination of lowercase letters or numbers.

[jdMorgan]

I don't see anything particularly difficult about this question.

Use mod_rewrite in .htaccess in the /cgi-bin/ subdirectory, use a RewriteRule pattern of "^connection$", use RewriteCond to check %{QUERY_STRING} for "14@228\.ymozaDvaic0\^0\@\.ee6" and create back-references, and decide based on that whether you need to redirect and where.

The documents cited in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com] may come in handy.

Jim

[chopin2256]

Thanks. Any insight on the first question I posed?

[jatar_k]

as long as you make sure you are properly sending a 404 for the requested url that no longer exists I don't really think it matters.

though you may want to look at some of the old urls and 301 them to their new home to help spiders fiond your new forums.

[jdMorgan]

From a usability, and to a lesser extent, SEO standpoint, you should 301 all pages for which there are direct replacements to those new pages, and respond to the rest with 404-Not Found or 410-Gone -- 404 for HTTP/1.0 clients, and 410 for HTTP/1.1 and later. However, if some of those pages' "scope" is well-defined -- in other words if you can identify groups of pages with specific subjects, then you could 301 those to "subject" pages (for example, the sub-forum indexes, or to a site map for that subject area). It all really depends on the site.

But consider users first, search engines second, and difficulty third.

Even when doing a 404 or 410, there's no reason to serve a cryptic or "scary" error page. Instead, explain that page has been removed, offer a link to your home page, a link to a site map, and... even though I think it's a kludge, consider a 15-to-20-second meta-refresh to your site map or home page -- Whatever would make the most sense to the user.

Jim

[chopin2256]

I was thinking, can't I just match anything that contains the word "connection" and redirect it to my forum? All these urls I want to redirect has /connection? in front of every string. If this was the case, wouldnt I be able to ignore the "14@228\.ymozaDvaic0\^0\@\.ee6"

[jdMorgan]

You can do anything that regular-expressions pattern-matching can do -- and that's quite a lot. It's deciding what you want to do that's the hard part. And that depends on whether you kept your old forum threads and gave them new names, or just threw them out.

I advise against redirecting 10,000+ URLs to one page. That would look like a massive doorway-page campaign. I'm not a big believer in so-called Google "penalties" -- but that might get you a real penalty.

Jim

[chopin2256]

I will take your advice and not do 301's then. All I did was a 404.shtml error page, so when a user clicks on the old forum links through a search engine, they will be directed to the 404.shtml custom error page I wrote. This page has all the links to the site, and to the new forum. The error pages still look like the original weird urls, but I assume that this is an ok approach. For example, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/connection?[e-mail]0^0@.ee6d35b will have my borders and site design. I forgot to do these error pages before. Now that I added the borders and links to the error page, will yahoo and msn spider through the anchortext now to hopefully spider the new forum?

[jdMorgan]

Actually, I'm not sure if they'll try to spider them or not. They are links, and so should be spidered by default. But I can't say; search engines could conceivably treat error pages as dead-ends. Try a few page links and see.

However, I would not rely on error page links to get the spiders into your forum. I'd suggest linking into the forum from your home page and other appropriate places instead.

Jim