SEO Tycoon

**69me** · 03-24-2008, 08:01 AM

Hello

I have been running my oscommerce store for years though a sub directory called "catalog" (www.mydomain.com/catalog/).

I have now upgraded and have the site running from 'root' (www.mydomain.com/).

I have used a couple of 301 redirects but is it bad to catch all other with the following?

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.mydomain.com/index.php

Cheers

p9

**chrishirst** · 03-24-2008, 08:07 AM

Yes!

because if you have any genuine 404 errors they will never be removed from the SE index

**onebrady** · 03-25-2008, 04:40 PM

If you don't have anything in this folder anymore just use a robots.txt file. Dang, How hard is that?

Although this is somewhat of an open ended question. You would first do a bit of research and find the current status of your inbound links. How many and where exactly do they point?

I am familiar with OSC and I would say the best thing that you could do is to stop optimizing the OSC store and start looking at Magentocommerce. There will be a production version available very soon and this program is way more robust and cleaner than OSC.

**lovekissing** · 03-27-2008, 03:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Yes!

because if you have any genuine 404 errors they will never be removed from the SE index

exactly and it will take quite some time to clean up those 404 in the search engine...

**chrishirst** · 03-29-2008, 07:49 AM

how does "never be removed" equate to

Quote:

take quite some time to clean up

??

**lovekissing** · 03-31-2008, 04:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

how does "never be removed" equate to

??

i can't believe you, this appears to be questionable to you chris!?

... of course this depends on how regular he will be updating his site so that the previews content will be covered up by the new content for spiders to crawl it...

**chrishirst** · 03-31-2008, 05:52 AM

Quote:

i can't believe you, this appears to be questionable to you chris!?

Not questionable to me at all, just don't understand your line of reasoning.

URIs that don't exist but are then sent to the home page WITHOUT returning a 404 status will stay in the index and be crawled and indexed with exactly the same content as the "home" page, this means if you have deleted x pages the site will then have x duplicate pages. Which may very likely lead to the "home" page being filtered out of the SERPs.

Quote:

of course this depends on how regular he will be updating his site so that the previews content will be covered up by the new content for spiders to crawl it..

Absolutely no idea what you mean by this! What does updating the site have to do with URIs that 404 out??

oh and BTW
@69me
You do realise of course, that if you have any missing images on the site they will be replaced by the "home" page as well!

**usearchme** · 03-31-2008, 07:40 AM

Hi there

This is something i have experianced myself and chris is right, the pages will get redirected and google will think the page is still there so will never be removed

I think a lot of people worry about 404 errors too much, as when a page is moved then you get a 404 error, because thats whats supposed to happen !

I moved a whole forum and got over 8000 404 errors, but google dropped them slowly naturally.

Woc

**lovekissing** · 04-02-2008, 03:22 AM

okay so its my mistake then...
; )