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Consider the following situation:
I have a MVC setup where the view invokes a mapper to get a specific URL for a href attribute. The mapper holds keys to make the referencing easy.

Now the view requests an invalid key, so the mapper responds with say /invalid_url. But the dispatcher knows this URL and when a user clicks the link an error message will be displayed about how bad we feel.

But what if the Google Bot visits this invalid URL?

What would a search engine friendly status code be? I feel like 500 would be appropriate because it is a server side failure. But then this has the feeling of being a temporary error or somehow not related to the URL but to the internal mechanics. The other option that comes to mind is 404. This is also valid because the requested page does not exist. However 4xx errors are client side errors ("You requested the wrong URL. So it's basically your error"). And it just doesn't feel like a client side error to me.

Am I overthinking things? Should I just go with 404?

Martin B.
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1 Answers1

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When I have a question like this, I refer to a site like http://www.restapitutorial.com/httpstatuscodes.html

5xx error codes imply that the server made a mistake. But you're saying the view (client-side) requested the wrong key. That sounds like a client-side error to me. While it's not the user's fault, the server doesn't know this, and the requested URL really doesn't exist. So a 404 would be appropriate.

But this is a weird case, and you should still want to fix the underlying issue of the client consistently(?) requesting a bad url.

apoteet
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