Dynamic Site Seo, What to use 301 redirect or 404 error page?

Hi

I am a newbie and have a dynamic site. New member pages are generated every day but since they are dynamic they are not SE friendly. My objective is to make these pages spider friendly and thus get them indexed. The site is developed in ASP and MS-SQL. I searched for the info and came across solving this either by ISAPI Rewrite or 404 error page.

When I asked my hosting co. whether ISAPI is installed on the server they said no and instead asked me to use 301 redirect.

Now I am confused and have following queries?

What is the difference between 404 and 301 and when are they used?
What are the advantages and disadvantages in both of them?

Finally what should I use and why and are both methods SE friendly and whether I would get penalised for using any of these methods?

Some of you may suggest me to change my hosting co. and go for ISAPI but I do not want to do so as fas as possible.

Harish

 

It's actually "404 Not Found".
This is the servers way of saying the requested page no longer exists. That's also how a search engine crawler treats it when it encounters it. You don't want to use it unless you want the search engine to think the page or resource being requested no longer exists - it'll disappear from the search engine index.

A 301 is actually "301 Moved Permanently"
This is what you should use when you want to tell the search engine that the requested resource is now xyz. (ie, you not only give the result code back to the bot, but the new URL as well).

For more info on HTTP Status Codes, go here

Cheers,

JL

 

However I have also read about people using 404 Custom Page to make their dynamic pages looks static so that the SE can index them.

Am I mixing things up?

Harish

 

Yes you are mixing things up.

You can not 'use 404' or 301 to make existing pages SEO friendly.

You use a 301 redirect or a 404 error message when the page requested can not be found. In case of a bad link or when your database is down for instance.

You can not use 404 to make a dynamic page look static. You make dynamic 404 pages and 'guess' what page they should have gone, then present a sorry message and suggest a link to proceed.

But I think 404 and 301 are not relevant to your original problem. You want SE friendly dynamic pages. 404 and 301 have nothing to do with that.

 

Then what is the ideal solution for me as my pages are dynamic and are displayed from MS-SQL database. We use ASP and new members add every day. For each member one dynamic page is created but the SE refuse to spider / index them. Unless these pages get indexed my site traffic will not increase drastically which I intend to do. Also my hosting company does not have a ISAPI Rewrite installed. I do not want to change them unless there is no option.

Really stuck for a good solution. Can anyone assist??

Harish

 

Show us the URL of one of those pages... It probably contains ?ID=xxxxxx preventing it to be indexed easily.

Without MOD rewrite or ISAPI rewrite, there's probably not much you can do apart from rewriting the script's code.

 

My ISP allows me to set a custom 404 page. I've created a PHP page for that, which does a syntax check on the requested URL, then tries to figure out what it should have been, and then creates a 301 redirect page.

 

Now that's smart... wish I had thought of that ... (oh, I just have )

 

The search engines will still ignore the page, as soon as the get a 404 response they end the session. This might prove useful to the visitors to the bots the oage doesn't exist.

 

Not true. Check out the articles on my site at http://www.lucentminds.com/ . Each article is actually being generated by a custom 404 error page that makes anyone, even search engines, index and cache it as a real page. The page content is actually in a database which the 404 error page draws from. The trick to this is all in the http header you return to your visitor. If the page exists or the page exists as a "Virtual Page" the 404 error page returns a header "HTTP/1.1 200 OK". If the page doesn't exist either on the server or database it returns the header "HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found".

Why do I do this instead of just creating pages? Simple, my php access on my current host has a safe mode that will not allow me to create pages or invoke system commands. So if I want to create my own CMS that is SEO friendly, I need to be able to provide my content as actual pages. Check it out in google. The method I used before was the typical "?article=00000001". Now I just tell it to go to "articlespage_00000001.php", with "articlespage" being the type of virtual page, and "00000001" being the argument number. I don't have to use "_" as a separator, it's just easier to read.

~~
Scott.

 

That's an ingenious trick. However, if you are fortunate enough to have access to your .htaccess file on a Unix/Linux type platform then you can merely create your own custom 404 error page. I usually just point it back to the main domain index file, but some sly folks out there get real creative and try to guess what the users intentions and provide them with related content. To set up your .htaccess for a 404 redirect check out: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/custom404.shtml

 

use 404. which is what I use personally.