404 Trap ads
 

Many sponsors provide a link code for a "404 Trap ad". I think I know what this is supposed to do, but I am not sure where to put the link. Do I install this on my host server somewhere?

Typically, you do something like

in your .htaccess

Ahhhh.....good ol' .htaccess.

Thanks! (ps, and it's working...:) )

How do search engines feel when they spider a sitemap, come across a 404 and go to another site?

I have no real reason to think it, but I would assume something like that would have a negative effect on how search engines look at your site. Does anyone know either way?

How about making your own 404 page? I think that would work better. Any thoughts?

You will always have more success making your own 404 pages, at least a surfer hasn't seen it before.

Maybe a sponsor could give you a toolbar installer while you're at it.
|pcsucks|

If the 404 Error Page is set up in the .htaccess, the request returned already a 404.

For a crawler of a searchengine it would look like this:

Host example.com
GET /something.html HTTP/1.1
-> 404


....

Now it is the question if the crawler fetches the 404 error page. I have not noticed, that google or yahoo are doing this.
Google does it only if you use the webmaster tools and verify your domain. This is to check if your server does return the 404 correctly.

A normal client (not everyone) would see the same as above but it would render the html send by the webserver.

this would be the 404 error page, which is send by the webserver.

Now i could ask why do you have 404? is it good not to dispaly an error message?

I prefer to turn off indexes in htaccess:

Options -Indexes

and let the error message display. If I accidentally delete a submitted page from my server I'd rather a reviewer see a 404 error then redirect.

Thanks for the info....I like the idea of making my own. I have the sponsor one up for now, but want to make one on my own domain. I am thinking of something like a "whoops" page with a small directory of links back to categories on my list. If anyone has one to show me to get some ideas, I would love to see one.

Here's how I do it on Quantum Porn and Planet Of Porn.

I've also experimented with redirects to sponsor, but it hasn't produced much in the way of sales.

Very nice...especially the Quantum Porn one...

Now I have something else to work on...|angry|

Nice Lemmy - beats the standard error page. Have you noticed any sales off your 404 pages or is it just a nice to have

No sales that I've been able to track, but if there is to be an error page it might as well have something useful for the surfer to click on.

Lemmy, you gave me some ideas and I came up with...

http://www.lusciousdelights.com/error404.php

anything need changing?

A potential note: If you are serving the file locally, based on the assumption that the 302 response is a bad thing to hand google for a few reasons... unintentional page scraping and potential duplicate content penalties.

So, if you do:

You might end up getting a dupe penalty or scraping yourself. What you really want is:

Now, when you do this, you will want to either put

or making sure that all of your links have absolute relative links:

Then, when you test things, make sure you do test a number of urls:

Code:

---

http://yoursite.com/asdfsadf
http://yoursite.com/asdfasdf/asdfasdf.html
http://yoursite.com/asdfasdf/asdfasdf/asdfasdf.html

---

What you want to check for here is to make sure that all links work, mouseovers, etc from each of the above paths.

What if I want a 404 page that creates more 404s? |loony|

Looks good to me, you keep the traffic and give them something useful to click on. |thumb

Thanks for that!!