URLs and 404s

[bencurthoys]

I’m just changing URLs to be more forgiving and less likely to throw a 404 error.

For example, if you have a URL

www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2/foldername3/productname

and you rename the product so it’s now productname2, instead of the old url giving a 404 error, it will take you to

www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2/foldername3

instead, because we can tell that that much works and that’s probably what they meant.

and if they entered

www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2/folderZZZARGHZZZname3

they’d get

www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2

because we could find at least that much.

Question:

1. It’s a bit of a pain (I think) redirecting
   www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2/folderZZZARGHZZZname3
   to
   www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2
   so www.example.com/sales/foldername1/foldername2/folderZZZARGHZZZname3 is what they’ll see in the browser address bar and will show up on Google Analytics. Is that a problem?

2. Does anyone have any reason to prefer a 404 error over a helpful page?