[Sigia-l] handling transitions to new site architectures?

[Eric Scheid]

On 24/7/03 2:03 PM, "Richard Wiggins" <rich at richardwiggins.com> wrote:
> a smart Error 404 handler.

using the 404 handler is smart, in that only the not-found exceptions incur
the extra processing delay involved

> We're about to transition the main Web presence of a large midwestern
> university to a new site, and we're doing the "soft launch" approach as well
> as a smart error 404 handler.  There will be ZERO link rot the day the new
> site goes live.  Eventually we'll turn on the Error 404 status code so
> spiders remove the stale URLs from their indexes.

Shouldn't you be using "301 Moved Permanent" ... and does anyone know which
search engine spiders are smart enough to update their databases
appropriately?

e.