SEO

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: 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.

i set one of my pages up like this: http://hondaswap.com/this-page-no-good

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

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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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