Spiders and 404 Errors

Better to Redirect to a Page, or a 404?

[abhorrent12]

Hope this is the right place to post this- it requires specific knowledge of how spiders work. (And all the spider experts seem to be in here.)

I have an account that allows users to host more than 1 domain.

You logon thru your MAIN domain -- or one.com
Then, additional domains (two.com, three.com etc) show up as sub-directories.

two.com shows under that domain URL- but ALSO (unintentionally) this way as well:
one.com/two
two.one.com
ETC.

* Using .htaccess I can redirect those un-wanted URLs to a page. OR, I can redirect them to a 404 Page Not Found Error.

I'd LIKE to redirect them to a 404- since I don't want duplicated content, or any relationship to exist between URLs.

I can do this, by redirecting a call for page webmasterworld.com/two to this:
webmasterworld.com/~

This shows as a valid 404 in Response Headers. (Some browsers keep the redirected URL on-screen, which is why I didn't redirect to webmasterworld.com/theresnothinghere

* QUESTION:
Does this hurt me with Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp etc? (assuming they stumble onto the URL)

[edited by: phranque at 6:00 am (utc) on May 31, 2008]

[encyclo]

Sending a 404 is usually the wrong approach. You should always aim for a situation where each resource is available via only one URI. In that case, you should use mod_rewrite (assuming an Apache server) to serve a 301 permanent redirect for everything in the secondary domains which is being accessed via the alternative URIs.