One of my network site decided to move to another hosting... leaving his subdomain behind for me. The thing is, one of the page in his subdomain is listed in DMOZ... and I don't know whether I should do a 404 or 301 to redirect all his pages to my current site. These are my plans... 1) Do a direct 404 custom error page and redirect it to my site... simple and clean. 2) Do a 404 custom error page and redirect it to his main page and then put a 301 redirect to my site on his index.php. So which of these 2 methods is better? For search engines and such. Ah and before I forget, that subdomain itself has a PR4 (the root subdomain). Currently, I am using method (1), I may change it depending on the opinion given by you guys.
Search engines don't care about which of the web server's mechanisms you used to return the result (custom error page, etc). All they care about is the actual HTTP status code you return, which is always 301 in your case. So, your question really is - "should I redirect my DMOZ page to the root of the old domain, which will then be redirected to the new domain or directly to the new domain?" I would redirect directly to the new domain (less redirections to follow) and I would use standard Apache redirection mechanism for this (e.g. Redirect, RedirectMatch or mod-rewrite). J.D.
Just to add to what J.D. says, make sure you are actually returning a 301 (not 404). Search engines WON'T index the content if you return 404, even if the "Not Found" page HTML is customized and prettied up for SEO purposes. The only point of customizing a 404 page is for human consumption (i.e., someone clicks to your site from on a dead link from another site, and you give them a nice 404 with a forward link to your homepage.) LC