Preparing Your New Site for Structural Changes - The Solution

(Page 2 of 6 )

Our solution was to create a manageable, dynamic system that would allow for the old links to work seamlessly for the search engines and customers while allowing our designers, developers, and clients to make the structural enhancements necessary to take the site to the next level.

To do this, we create a new 404 page and told the web server to serve this page as the default. This new 404 page is actually a script that will make an attempt to find the content that the visitor is looking for and serve it, rather than the default action of displaying an error message.

To do this, several things must first be in place:

1. A custom 404 page written in some form of scripting language (in this article I use PHP)
2. An httpd.conf (can be in form of .htaccess file) entry telling the server to serve the new 404 page on page request failures
3. A database of old (replaced) pages with a new entry for each old page entry.

Next: Improper Redirect: Simple Redirection Header >>
 

More Search Optimization Articles
More By Bill Sterzenbach

Comments On: Preparing Your New Site for Structural Changes

>>> Be the FIRST to comment on this article!