Search instead of 404 - Vtex Brazil

[SeoMartin1]

Vtex in one of the best e-commerce in Brazil and I´ve just find out they transform any 404 page in a search page.

Polishop ( http://www.polishop.com.br/ ) is one of their clientes and if you try to search any page it will never return a 404 error because convert any url in a search.

Example: http://www.polishop.com.br/12345678 - 200: HTTP/1.1 200 OK ( it does not return a 404 code)

I´m a little bit confused if this good or not... what do you think moz experts?

[AlanMosley]

It can be good, to redirect users to simular content, but not how they have done it, but I think there are much better things to spend you time on.

What they have done is returned a Status code of 200, this will cause problems with soft 404s.

Also when you create a 404 page, you really should not have any external files such a images css or js files, this can cause a eternal loop if any of these files goes missing. a missing image will create a 404, that will call the 404 page that will cause a it to happen al over again. Crawlers will not like this. Bing once stated that they see your site of low quality of this is the case.