Create a Custom vBulletin "404 Page Not Found" Page, and direct vBSEO to use it.

Thank you webwizzy, your instructions worked like a charm!

Is it a good idea to redirect the 404 to the forum's home page ?

no.

http allows 1 header.

if you
404
then
301
you sent 2 headers.

Huh? Went over my head.

Everyone that uses this should add:

PHP Code:

define('SKIP_SESSIONCREATE', 1); 


to the top of their 404 file so that vBulletin doesn't track your 404 errors in whos online.

Why shouldn't vB track them?

Because its annoying to see this: vBulletin Community Forum over and over again in Whos Online.

Ok, depends on the forum's size, I think .

Can someone explain to me what benefit this is to me and my forums.

Having a valid 404 page is a HUGE factor in keeping people who stumbled on old, dead, deleted, etc links/pages from sites ON your site.


If you just tell them 404, they will probably X-out.
If you give them a landing page, with some search options, etc etc, you can possibly convert a user or get an ad click out of it.

google has custom 404 tool searches now. check webmasters area out.

Could you redirect them straight to the Google site search, skipping over the 404 page quickly with a JS redirector?

I'm trying to implement this to my site but it doesn't seem to work and when I try going directly to 404.php I get a "Content Encoding Error" ( FireFox )

http://malesopranos.com/404.php

Is this a web server configuration problem?

I tried under this link everything:
Create a Custom vBulletin "404 Page Not Found" Page, and direct vBSEO to use it.

It was a mistake in php.ini , the memory limit is not high enough.
After that I put the limit higher, and than I get INTERNAL SERVER ERROR!

What can I do, that this error doesnßt come any more?


http://www.muhakeme.net/404.php

Hello,
I also posted about this in my critique thread, yet I think this part of the post is more relevant here, being that I am having a weird bot problem after modding my 404 pages.

Here is what happened:
I decided to go about creating custom 404 pages after using this tutorial and once finished I came across a very strange issue. I now keep getting the Google bot: "ff-in-f84.google.com" which is viewing a non-existent file: "/noexist_c8822c20c1db71a8.html" from the very moment I completed the tutorial. How do I clear this problem? I heard it is a bot that tests 404 page stability, these new builds are sending red flags to Google left and right.

Please help.

Thanks,
-Chris

Thousands of 404 Not Found with Google Web Crawl