Do search engines have a problem with this? What I mean is, I had set up a system that whenever a url was entered, and I knew it didnt exist, I would return some form of content anyway. The thing is I was never sending a 404 message in a header. My intention is that one day, I will take the invalid data, look for something useful, and produce content based on what I find. Now I am beginning to think that maybe I should continue with doing that, but instead; send the 404 header anyway, and deliver conent as well. Is there a problem with never returning a 404?
If you don't return a 404 it will just be indexed as content like normal as far as I'm aware. If you're asking "will there be an adverse search engine reaction from this?".. I don't see how it would negatively impact you.. It would be an easy way to produce pages, all you have to do is to point in-links to fictitious pages..
"the client component notifies an error processing server, " Joebert, this patent i believe is refering to the verisign, verizon, 404 results page crap (i think). My method does not have the client send data to an "error processing server". The client in fact, never gets a 404 message. My method involves using PHP commands at act upon a url / (uri) request. "wherein the client component is responsive to detection of the unavailability of a target web page " the client will never know it hit a 404/301.. anything "The system of claim 1, wherein the client component is a browser plug-in." I think Jeff is stretching it a bit. Anyway the point is, I don't generate a 404 result. Just want to see if it would cause any issues.
I'm not sure about that patent either, that's why I didn't say anything else. I wanted to see how someone else intrepreted it. You could run into problems if your script locates irrelevant content, as search engines will see the new content as updated content for that page. If you have alot of 404s that end up pointing to the same page, you might get a duplicate content penalty.
Joe, thats what I was looking for. I have other issue I need to fix with google at this point. For some reason they are showing 404's for pages that would exist on another site, but think it's on another. extremely confusing, but may or may not be because of server maintainance on the hosts part. Even if it was dupe, I's not sure that would matter, seeing how if the data isn't supposed to be there, google doesn't need to index that page. Not sure I care about googles crawlers' feeling, just the visitors. I'll have to work on getting as close to relevant as possible when a page isn't found. Thanks for the feedback.