404 pages and google

[AbraxasEnt]

hi, i read some old topics on the subject but still find myself somewhat confused. i recently changed the names of a bunch of directories, and i figured the easiest way to redirect those who go to the old urls would be with htaccess, i want to direct them to a page with a link to my index page preferable, would google not like this for any reason? thanks

[Slade]

If the pages no longer exist, you should use a 410 Gone message, then maybe include a link back to your home page in the error message.

If the pages were just shuffled around, use a 301 redirect. This will help your users and bots find their way to the new pages.

[AbraxasEnt]

i just moved them, changed the name of some directories, as for the 301, do i have to do that for every page i moved? that would take a long time.

[Slade]

Perhaps you can entice jpMorgan to answer this, but I believe you can. You should be able to Rewrite the olddir/ to the newdir/. Take a look at: [httpd.apache.org...] and then search for mod_rewrite on this site or google.

I'm going to take a stab at it and say your redirects should look like this:

RewriteRule  ^olddir(.*)$ newdir$1 [R=301,L]

*I didn't test that code...

[Tropical Island]

This may sound too simple however we just created a custom 404 page with our index and a short note saying that the searcher had reached a dead or incorrect link. In order to not run into duplicate problems with google we then put in a "noindex" robots text. We've been doing this for the last 8 months with no problems.

[EarWig]

Same here Tropical_Island

The spider should remove it on the next update.

EW

[WebGuerrilla]

The problem with the custom 404 is that you lose the PR transfer. If the pages have been relocated and there were other links on the web pointing to them, a 301 will tell Google that the old links now belong to the new address.

[EarWig]

ARGH!
We learn something new every day :-)
Thanks for the lesson WebGuerrilla - back to the drawing board for me again.
EW

[jdMorgan]

AbraxasEnt,

As Slade says, use a 410-Gone for pages which have no logical replacement, and a 301-Moved Permanently redirect for those which have been renamed or functionally replaced.

Also, heed WebGuerilla's warning about PR transfer... You may never regret taking a shortcut to save some work, but you will never regret conforming to the protocols and doing things right.

To redirect all requests for resources in /olddir to the same-named resources in /newdir, you can use the following code.

In .htaccess, using mod_rewrite:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^olddir/(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/newdir/$1 [R=301,L]

or alternately, using RedirectMatch

RedirectMatch permanent "^/olddir/(.*)$" http://www.yourdomain.com/newdir/$1

I didn't test this code either, but it should be close.

Jim