404s and seo

Hi,

Does redirecting 404 pages to the main/home page of your site would be beneficial or seo freindly ?

Does this code in htaccess hold good:-

ErrorDocument 404 domain.com

I got a lot of 404 pages and was thinking if it's the best of the solutions ?

Thanks.

 

Yes, it would be a good idea to implement 301 redirects to your home page for all your 404 pages.

 

Thats a good idea, have you tried it yet?

 

I am using it, and think it is ok.
Anyway, cannot confirm if it is the best solution.

 

I don't think this is a good idea. IF people arrive at the wrong page the 404 should tell them this and give them advice about what they can do next, such as visit the home page. If you redirect them to the home page it may confuse them because they don't arrive at the page they were expecting to arrive at and they haven't been told that they are being redirected to an alternative page.

Is it good for SEO? Well it shouldn't be. You shouldn't really have it indexed, it's an error page not a content page.

 

It is very good and useful and it will not create any problem for your website

 

This is Very Useful and Nice idea

 

I agree with soulfuldude(did I spell that right).... A 404 page is just that a 404 page, it refers to a page that is no longer. The proper way to handle this is to design your 404 page with new graphics(404 related) and links back to your live site... In other words, spend x amount of time designing your 404 page.

make sense?

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

totally agreed

 

instead you should put a message over there that this is an error page and you may move on to the homepage by clicking on this URL.