Handling 404 errors. Redirect to home page or custom 404 page?

[hughesca]

Is there a preference search engines have?

 

I could also do a custom 404, with auto redirect (after a specific time) to the home page as well.

 

I'm just not certain what impact one will have vs another.

 

Peace,

Chris

[germ]

My thinking is this:

 

Siince it's an osC shop you're going to have hackers banging away at it trying to find a way in.

 

And they're going to produce a lot of errors.

 

Because of that I'd redirect to a custom 404 page with minimal content (as little as possible) so they consume as little bandwidth as possible.

 

The spiders probably won't see the 404 page all that often. They normally just follow the links on the pages. That shouldn't produce very many errors.

[Guest]

Chris,

 

I often place this line in the .htaccess file:

 

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

 

 

 

Chris