#836 – 404 Request Manager

Hi

From an SEO standpoint, you should probably NOT redirect them. You should redirect one old page to a new one only if they have similar content. If not, it's better to return a 404, so that search engines update their index quickly.

If some actual real humans have bookmarked some pages on those old sites (but is that possible? you said those were only test sites??), then you could redirect, but again only if you redirect to a similar page. That can be done in sh404SEF, using the alias input box for the new URL. Please see this page in documentation.

If you don't have one to one redirects, then you can also simply redirect all /bdsites/* URLs to the root page of your site. That's done in a .htaccess file, not in PHP.

From your description, the best thing is probably to not do anything, and have those pages return a 404 if someone visit them - but again, why would anyone visit them?

Rgds

Hi

If you have some visits, it probably means some pages have been indexed by search engines and they now come back to check on them. As you return 404s for those pages, soon they'll remove them from their index. You can check back in a few weeks and see if the number of hits keeps increasing. When there are no more visits, you can simply delete them from the 404 manager.

As for the other 404s, linking to images or css, you should have the same approach as for all and any 404s:

- find if the 404 is a wrong link on your site
- or a wrong link on somebody else site
- or just a plain wrong request

The most important is wrong links on your site, which you can easily check with online links checkers.
The particular example you show might be a bad link to an image in one article (do you know about this image?), or just something old, that you fixed since then.

Rgds