Script minus?terms returns 404

will search engines still index the?terms pages

[internetheaven]

Our site layout uses /folder/script.php?terms+terms for page generation. We have set it up so that:

/folder/script.php?pages+that+don't+exist returns a 404 page/header.

but, that means that:

/folder/script.php?
and
/folder/script.php

also return 404 headers. Will search engines ignore all our:

/folder/script.php?page1
/folder/script.php?page2
/folder/script.php?page3

pages if:

/folder/script.php is a 404?

[barns101]

I don't think that they should even request script.php as long as all of your links have variables in the URI. However, you could set up a small piece of code to email you every time script.php was requested without any variables in the URI. If it turns out that the search engines are requesting the plain URI, then set up a 301 redirect to your home page or something.

[coopster]

Or better yet you might even set up

script.php

without any query string to be an index listing of the possible pages that could be appended. That way, if for some reason the bot crawls the page it will index the subsequent pages. For the record though

http://example.com/script.php 
http://example.com/script.php?name=value

are two separate URIs and should be handled as such by search engine spiders.