I need help redirecting some "page not found" errors to a specific page. The site is still in Drupal 5.
I have taxonomy set up as category/surnames/
Another site (beyond my control) sends me a lot of traffic, but they generate a lot of "page not found" errors on my site. Their set up is this: You type your surname into a search box and it generates a page of links that read "Find information on the Smith Family at this site." When their user clicks on the link for my site and I have a page at category/surnames/smith everything is just fine. But when the surname is Faasen, Foro or another one that I do not have a page for, the search returns a "page not found" error. When their site is spidered, their links to category/surnames/faasen etc. are spidered and thousands more "page not found" errors are generated.
What I need is a redirect that will send category/surnames/faasen (and thousands of others that there is no page for) to a specific page that's not a "page not found" .... while still keeping category/surnames/smith (and thousands of others) going to the correct page. So I don't need to redirect all category/surnames - just the ones I don't have a page for.
Two other non-drupal sites have a nice page solution for this problem. One sends
http://www.ancientfaces.com/research/surnames/F/Faasen
to
http://www.ancientfaces.com/research/submit
Thank you for helping me.
Comments
Suggestions & alternative approaches
There is a way to handle your problem/404 (actually a number of modules), but after reading your description of the workflow, I am wondering if it would not be a little more beneficial tot he user if you presented information that is "the next best thing" when the URL does not yield a direct page. I am thinking about using the "search 404" module that captures 404 errors and parses keywords in the URL resulting in a search result of content on your site.
If you had this approach implemented, ..../research/surnames/F/Faasen would do a search on your side for the keywords "research, surnames, Faasen" and will almost always not just provide a clean 404 error, but provide a list of pages that have similar content to what the user wants... maybe there is already a page that deals with Faasen, but that is not under that exact URL...
If you want to just handle 404 errors elegantly, there is a myriad of modules to choose from - you can check drupal.org or drupalmodules.com for ideas and examples
Forward to a Nice, Pretty Page
What you're suggesting sounds interesting. One thing, I really need to do is (if there's a way) is send the user somewhere that's not a 404 error. (The error logs from this thing are unbelievable - we are talking about thousands of pages that reach a 404 error from the surname thing and when my site is being spidered they errors generate at about 6 to 10 per minute.) So, if there's a way to forward them to a page that could tell them to check back with us, as we add photos daily, give them the search box and some other search tips, etc., I think they'd still get a benefit. (Certainly more than the plain white "page not found" page we give them now.) And, all of these 404 errors that are really for pages that never existed would go away...