404 setting

There is an option to redirect to the forum home page, or go to the 404 page.

Is it advised to redirect 404 errors back to the forum home?

I personally redirect 404 Errors back to the forum home, personally just because users tend to leave a website whenever they encounter a 404 error, especially if just reached through a search engine result. Therefore by redirecting to the forum homepage you are retaining some of your possible traffic.

Is there any concerns with google or the other search engines in regards to this? I would rather have my forums redirecting back to the forumhome as well, just didnt know if it was safe to set it to that, especially considering it is set to "no" out of the box.

I know that Google Sitemap throws up an error if you handle 404 errors, by presenting 200 "OK" message with a redirect. But i dont see any evidence to suggest an adverse effect on general ranking and indexation.

cant your competitors misuse this ?
re-directing 404 pages to forums or site home.

I suggest setting up the following so that you both comply with google wanting a 404 not found header, not a 200 ok, and still displaying the home page.

Use the "custom" option in the vbseocp to go to a script name like error.php or something...

then create a new php file, and in that file, paste the following:

Code:

 <?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
header("Location: http://www.yoursite.com/forumroot");
 ?>

Originally Posted by Future

cant your competitors misuse this ?
re-directing 404 pages to forums or site home.

in what way?

if they navigate on purpose to yoursite.com/thispagedoesnotwork they will simply get re-directed.

Code:

 <?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
header("Location: http://www.yoursite.com/forumroot");
 ?>

I just realized that this doesn't work... it appears the vbseo redirect already sends a header.

When "File not found handler" is set to "custom" in vbseocp, vBSEO doesn't send any headers, leaving this for the custom script.
However, in your example the headers both include 404 code and "location" for redirect, while it should be either 404 code (file not found) OR 30x code+Location header (redirect).
HTTP/1.1: Status Code Definitions