Best way to handl 404 not found errors

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[tonynoriega]

i have some old pages that are popping up in Google as 404 not found...REAL OLD...

i have the script for my ASP pages to redirect propertly via "301 moved permanently", but what about HTML pages....

i dont want to use the META REFRESH because i heard SE's dont like them...is there another method for HTML pages...

[jdMorgan]

This is usually done at the server configuration level. How it is done depends on your server type (e.g. IIS or Apache) and how your server is set up (e.g. control panel, user-modifiable configuration code).

Return a 410-Gone for intentionally-removed resources for which there is no relevant replacement. The 410-Gone error page should contain an explanation of how the user got there, and a link to your site map or home page.

If a URL does have a replacement, then a 301-Moved Permanently redirect from the old URL to the new URL is the best practice.

Return a 404-Not Found only if the page is missing as the result of a server error, a script error, a Webmaster error, or a user error (e.g. mistyping the URL in the browser address bar). The 404-Not Found error page should contain an explanation of how the user got there, and a link to your site map or home page.

Ref: HTTP/1.1 Status Code Definitions [w3.org] (Server response codes)

However, the overall "best practice" is to never change your URLs. Forethought when designing the URL-architecture of a site can prevent the need to ever change or remove a URL. Because URLs and filenames are different names for the same resource (in the Web and server filesystem name-spaces respectively), they need have no relationship to each other; You can easily move or rename a file on the server without changing the URL by using Apache mod_rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite on IIS. From one of the two inventors of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URLs don't change [w3.org].

Jim

[edited by: jdMorgan at 2:54 pm (utc) on Oct. 13, 2006]