: Is it better to have an ErrorDocument 404 redirect back to the homepage or a standard 404 error page? We run an ecommerce site that was setup by a third party ecommerce software provider,

@Vandalay111

Strong vote for a dedicated 404 page.


Less confusing for the user
Allows you to see more easily if something is wrong (through web server error log, your own logging script and/or Google Analytics)
You can tailor the page towards the situation (for example display a list of product categories)
Allows search engines to clean up their indexes. No longer existing pages in a search engine's index may prevent new pages from being added.


On the last point: Make sure to actually return a 404 error. From what you're saying it sounds like it's currently a 301/302 redirect. To do so include

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.htm


in your htaccess file.

Also see
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-your-404-pages-more-useful.html

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@Kimberly868

I'd vote for a separate error page if only to let the users of your site know that the link they clicked failed or they typed the wrong URL. It would be confusing to get back to the home page. I know I'd be tempted to repeat my actions to see if I'd done something wrong!

If you added a "report this broken link" link or even logged it yourself, you'd get notification and a chance to fix problems with the site.

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