What are the downsides of 301ing all the 404 links pointing to my site

[internetheaven]

I've tried contacting as many webmasters as possible to get links fixed but there is quite a number of broken links pointing to my site. Stuff like:

www.example.com/">
www.example.com/page1 .htm
www.example.com/www.example.com
www.example.com)
etc.

1. What negative effects, if any, (search engine wise) could I see from sending all these links 301 to an inner page instead of the custom 404 error page?

2. How do you alter your htaccess file to actually 301 these links instead of 404?

Currently I have

ErrorDocument 404 /customererror.php

in the htaccess file.

Thanks
Mike

[Shaddows]

Whitenight is ranting about them, and Tedster posts some genric advice over on page 8 of November Google SERPS [webmasterworld.com]

[Receptional Andy]

If these requests come from malformed links, and you know where the request should actually go, then a 301 is entirely appropriate and has (IMO) no downside whatsoever. You're showing the right content to the user, and may preserve the benefit from the links.

You have to redirect these files specifically within your .htaccess file. I would use mod_rewrite to achieve this. There are plenty of examples over in the apache forum [webmasterworld.com].

[g1smd]

Yes, the 301 redirect is quite appropriate for removing "trailing punctuation junk".

Some of your examples are already offered in the Apache forum here, and it isn't all that difficult to modify them to add your additional items.