404s Redux

[Peter Murray]

--On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 3:55 PM -0700 Avi Rappoport <avirr at lanminds.com>
wrote:
> You may want to make sure that your server does in fact return a 404 
> while displaying the error page (I know they can do this, because my 
> server, WebSTAR on Mac OS does the right thing).
> 
> If you do some kind of redirect, robots, such as search engine 
> crawlers, may become thoroughly confused and index the target page 
> with the original URL.  That would be bad.

The process runs as an "NPH", or Non Parsed Headers, script.  (This is why
it is prefaced with the "nph-" prefix for our Netscape Enterprise server.
Your server may vary, but I believe the same is true for Apache servers.)
With a NPH script, the server does not interpret the output of the script
before sending it back to the client.  Therefore, it is the script's
responsibility to return the correct 3-digit response code.  The robots and
crawlers use these three digit response codes to determine if a page has
moved or is gone.

Thanks, Roy, for posting the information about our 404 CGI script.


Peter
--
Peter Murray, Library Systems Manager                    pem at po.cwru.edu
Digital Media Services                 http://www.cwru.edu/home/pem.html
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio          W:216-368-8834