A long time ago I tried out the coop and wasn't able to have my site validate (see thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=7024) because Google had a few pages in its index that didn't actually exist. However, instead of a 404, Movable Type was returning a page that reads: An error occurred: No such comment Here's an example: http://www.dbloss.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red&id=695 I think when I first installed the coop there wasn't an MT plugin. Does the new plugin alleviate this problem? Is there another way I can force Movable Type to give a 404 instead of this useless page that basically indicates the same thing? I'd really like to go back to the Coop, but this problem is forcing me to run link-vault. Thanks for the help!
Thanks for the reply. I tried to do that before, but new pages of the same problematic type kept appearing, and I would lose validation or never get it in the first place. So I was thinking about this... I think these pages are being created when an engine spiders a comment link, and then that comment gets deleted (usually spam). Ordinarily, MT will take that comment and redirect to the commenter's URL so that no PR is passed. When the comment gets deleted, there is no record, and MT returns that ridiculous error page. Could I use the nofollow tag to prevent the passing of PR, and then disable that MT comment URL redirect feature, and then 301 all of the problem URLs to the homepage? Comment URLs look like this: www.dbloss.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red&id=695 where the id could be anything. Would that work in terms of coop validation? Can the validation bot be 301'd and still validate the site? If so, what would that 301 look like? (I'm not familiar with mass 301s) I'm certain others are having this same problem. Thanks so much for the help.