custom error pages

why not just do redirect?

[miki99]

I've just changed the filenames of some pages on my site, and I'm wondering what exactly happens now if I don't create custom error pages. It seems to me, from what I've been reading lately, Google might see the cached old pages and the new ones as duplicate content?

In the past I simply deleted the old page and did a redirect from the old url to the new one. I'm assuming that's not good enough, if custom error pages are so important.

As you can tell, I'm pretty confused, and hope someone can straighten me out.

[tedster]

1. If you have content similar to the old url but now at a new url, then a 301 redirect is the way to go. Do not redirect in any other fashion (302, meta-refresh, etc)

2. If you do not have a new url that is similar to the old url, then go with a 404 error page, custom or default. Just make sure that a custom page delivers a 404 http header, or you can confuse the saerch engines mightily.

These two steps will serve both your human visitors and the search engines quite wwll.

[miki99]

Thanks so much for the clarification, Ted.

[miki99]

Ummmm...I'm actually in the position of having to create some custom 404 error pages for the first time now, after some major reorganizing, and find that I'm clueless.

I have no idea about server-side scripting.

Is there any reason why I can't just redirect the visitor to a closely related new url (even though that page might not be identical to the original)?

Or, in cases where a page simply no longer exists in any form (like, I completely got rid of the "blue widgets"), can't I just do something low-tech like creating a page for the old url, with the message "this page no longer exists," and then provide links to the home page or other pages that might interest the visitor?

Or would this somehow mess up the search engine bots?

My Cpanel, incidentally, has a form that allows you to create custom error pages, but dork that I am, I can't even figure out how to use that. You can choose options like: "Referring URL," "Requested URL," etc. The above two options create the following bits of code respectively:

<!--#echo var="HTTP_REFERER" -->

<!--#echo var="HTTP_REFERER" -->

Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do with them.

[miki99]

Nevermind, I figured it out. I didn't understand that you had to enter a full HTML document for the nonexistent page in the provided form box (in the Cpanel "Custom Error Pages" thingy).

[mack]

Yea Cpanel automates this for you. If you did not have cpanel you would need to create a page and referance it from your .htaccess file.

Mack.

[miki99]

TG for Cpanel! I have very little idea how I would have done that, as you describe. I didn't even realize at first that I was creating only ONE 404 error page for my entire site. I thought I'd have to create a separate one for any and all pages I deleted. Anyway, I'm very pleased to have that up and working now.