Hello
I'm curently developing a website, and i'm using mod_rewrite to get search engine friendly url's.
My original url would look something like this:
http://www.example.com/index.php?cat...roduct=shampoo
And now it looks like this:
http://www.example.com/products/shampoo
I then have a script in the index file which sorts out the address, and delivers the right content.
As you can see, the url is much prettier now and it contains the exacts keywords that i want. But i'm a little worried about google and other search engines on this matter.
What if the user enters the url himself into the browser, and he misspells "category"
Eventhough i don't have a category that is spelled like the misspelled version, the user will still not get a 404 error.
I've heard a rumor, that google will on times send random urls to a website to check if it gets a 404 error or not. If google does not recieve a 404 error with it's many attempts, it can conclude that the website is using technology to to serve content no matter if the content that is searched for, exists or not. Ergo, serving false content.
I can definatly see the logic in this rumor.
Obviously, google will never get a 404 error on my website right now.
Therefore i was thinking that i could add a script to the index file, which checks if the category and keywords exist, and if it does not exist, it will serve a 404 error.
However, if i do it this way, Apache will first redirect to the index file, which serves a 200 ok message, then it redirects to the 404 error. The problem here, as i see it, is that google first recieves the 200 ok message, which indicates that the url is ok, and only after that, google is redirected to the 404 error.
Regarding this situation i have 3 questions:
Will google put my site on penalty for not serving a 404 emediatly, but with a redirect?
What is the best way of redirecting to a 404 error page?
Is it the same for all search engines?
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