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It all depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want people to see a 404 page then serve them a useful 404 page. If you're trying to redirect link value then you should 301 to the most relevant page to what that URL used to have on it. For me a 404 error is a great opportunity to catch the visitor and give them something of use. If you redirect 404s you'll also reduce your site's general server errors, which can only be a positive thing, right?

I like http://www.uservoice.com/, which has a floater widget. Also has helpdesk features as well. Other options are http://www.zendesk.com (which SEOmoz currently uses for the Feedback widget on the left side of your screen) and http://www.luckyorange.com for live chat and real-time analytics.

Thanks for the RE Cyrus. One of my architects and I came to a similar conclusion, but it's definitely good to hear it from another source in the SEO community on the development side of things. We decided to implement a side-wide rel=canonical to the http URLs to avoid duplication issues, as well as ensure resources are using relative links. I'm hoping this solves each issue with minimal impact!

Hi Cody. I just got in on the tail end of this. I'd also put keywords in the file name. Check out a previous thread on this.

Thanks guys. This is an interesting case indeed. Maybe it's just me being an SEO, but I tend to look at the URL on a good majority of the pages I hit. I don't want to confuse my users or provide them with inaccurate information. .4mm and 4mm is a big difference. I'm going to try out the decimal point and see how it behaves. I'll report back once we get the pages up.

Sounds like solid advice to me. I'm very glad I attended today. I was about to pull the trigger on 75+ redirects Thanks for taking the time to Chime in Dr. Pete and thanks to Robert as well for the great answer.

Yea, that's on the list to do. The site is about halfway finished so there is still a lot of errands to take care of such as that. Sitemapping is something I haven't done a lot of in the past so I'm not fully aware of all of it's benefits. So to be clear using that method I can generate a sitemap that will create every possible page that can be generated from those parameters, then they'll be crawled? Is there anything additional I can do to ensure they are crawled? I suppose I could do a writeup of each product over time in our blog and link to them that way.

Have you seen the 'business case' template files that Econsultancy have? They have one for SEO specifically... Maybe a help? (Although it is from 2010 it seems! So maybe update any stats!) http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/sem-search-engine-optimisation-seo-business-case It does cost though, unless you or anyone in your company has a membership there? Personally, I find that working out some basic figures on traffic increases with existing, and forecast conversion rates can help. In addition, do you track what the leading competing brand is doing? I sometimes find that whilst some folks further up the food chain will be convinced by the figures and stats, others will be convinced by seeing that their leading competitor is spending on SEO (this can be proved by measuring various metrics, checking out their social profiles, etc). I guess nobody wants to be the last kid in the playground chosen for the team? <-- Even with this though, having some stats on projected ROI is a very good idea, and yup, as Promoteam said above... presentation matters!

Does anyone else have anything to add to this? I figured it wasn't a big deal. Just wanted to check. Am I missing anything before we go ahead and implement this feature into our site?

We'll be using IIS, but I suppose it works the same way. It's my hope to get this done with one small change and not have to update an entire database of thousands of pages. Can that not be done?

I don't know what the rest of that passage says, but I don't see in that excerpt how the author says they should be separate. All he is saying is what a blog is meant to accomplish. It can still be a part of your site, hosted on your domain, without being fully and completely integrated with all of the pages. It can look a little different, have a different feel about it, etc, but still be run within the parameters of your website.