redirecting and 404,

redirecting several subdirectories.........

[helenp]

Hi would like to ask if there are any way redirections on an 404.shtml could be penalized?
Just put it in and we are losing position in google........
In root if file is missed goes directly into 404.shtml thats directde to main page.
And in the subdirectorys I put in an .htacces file that "redirects" to an file I named 404.shtml and that redirects to the index file in that subdirectory.............

altough I told robots.txt not to index them.

Thanks,
Helen

[takagi]

Hi Helen, Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

A 404 (Not Found) is to indicate the file is deleted. You better use a 301 (Moved permanently). If Google keeps seeing this 404, then they will remove that page from their index.

[helenp]

Thanks, didnīt know that,
been running a site for more than a year and just changed host,
on the other I couldnīt do anything, but know have to do all by myself.
How to setup that 301?
Been reading a bit, how to write the links in the .htacces,
is their a way to setup that all missing links to display 301 redirect?
I do take away pages very often, and with the 404 lose many visitors, if google excludes it.......
and is it really legal? not to penalize.

regards,
Helen

[takagi]

>> How to setup that 301?
That depends on the OS of the old server. You can enter the URL at the Server Header Check [webmasterworld.com] page and see if the result has a line like

Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)

or like

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

Also important to know is how many pages we are talking about (thousands?), if the directory/filename structure is unchanged and if you have many deeplinks (links form other sites to sub pages instead of links to the home page).

[helenp]

thanks, itīs apache, anyway, checked it:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 15:00:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.2 PHP/4.3.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Last-Modified: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 11:10:33 GMT
ETag: "398088-2f61-3fc5dba9"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 12129
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Well not really thousands, but itīs an travel site,
and in root is the english web, and in subdirectories the spanish and swedish web, once a month take a way one availability page, and often takes a way properties we donīt rent out anymore, were spidered by google often.

So when take away pages, I do take away the english from root, and the same page in subdirectory spanish and english, and still people entering searching on properties taken away for months ago.
The links to my site from other sites, is normally the root index, and the index files from the subdirectories..... though they are in diferent languages.

Im really scared about the site keeping descending..............
helen

[takagi]

been running a site for more than a year and just changed host

Not sure if I understand your problem correctly. When you changed host, did you change the domain name or could you keep your old domain name? If it changed, please send me a sticky mail as it is not allowed to post your own URL at this forum (as you already did in your last post). If you didn't change domain name, then why would you need to do redirects?

[helenp]

OHhhhhhhh.
see I donīt explains to well.
I only changed host, not domain name,

And need the redirect for the files that are eliminated, though the web changes a lot, but they keep indexed in google for long time.
My site are losing position from 1st page very fast, were are now on 3rd or 4th page.
And though heard redirecting is bad, was worried maybe redirection that I have could have anything to do if bad made.

The sort of redirections I have is: in 2 subdirectories I did an .htacces file with code: ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/404.shtml and in that 404.shtml there is an redirection like this: <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=index.htm">

In the root .htacces file there is no code at all though the 404 errors automatically goes the the 404.shtml root file, that have the same refresh code

Thanks a lot
Helen

Did put the url in, when reading in another post that itīs not legal, took it away, didnīt know

[edited by: tedster at 1:07 am (utc) on Nov. 28, 2003]
[edit reason] use 'example.com' [/edit]