simonmlewis wrote:Back about 4 years ago, we had older style of urls, and issues where we hadn't referred favicon.ico to /favicon.ico. So the URL was wrong.
The Code in the site is now correct for it, and has been for years.
You aren't obligated to support URLs for eternity. If it's been 4 years since you changed it then people (clients, search engines, bots, whatever) have had that long to figure out they should stop requesting the old favicon path. Changing it from 404 to 301 isn't suddenly going to make them change their ways.
simonmlewis wrote:We read about 404 increases being bad. But if the 404 goes to a proper nice "Sorry that page is not here, look at the menu at the top, click here for the homepage, or search here".... is that ok? So if you had 100, 200 404s, it would not matter, if the page really does not exist.
You're talking about two different things.
1. Increases in 404s are bad. It's not because 404s themselves are bad but because the increase is a symptom of a potential bug in your site and
that is bad.
2. Making the 404 page be helpful to the user is important. They shouldn't see these pages normally, and wouldn't in the case of a favicon (so a minimal 404 for such resources is fine), but it will happen so you should try to help people find what they were looking for. You would use 3xx redirects when deprecating old URLs so that automated systems can detect the change and recover gracefully, but after a while - like four years - it's okay to stop redirecting.
simonmlewis wrote:Then you only do 301s if the page SHOULD be pointing elsewhere.
Not sure if you're intentionally getting into the technical nature of a 301, but yes: for the act of redirecting you do need someplace to redirect to. But that's besides the point here. The point I'm trying to make is not that you could redirect to /favicon.ico but that you don't need to. It's an old URL. It hasn't been supported in years, deliberately or not. Redirecting (as far as this conversation goes) is a graceful measure to ease transitions to new URLs, not an obligation to backwards compatibility.
simonmlewis wrote:We need to be able to add some 301s for URL structures we don't use. I know Wordpress handles structures very differently, as the HTACCESS file has very little in it.
But we used WP as an example of "why can we not 301 to any page".
.htaccess redirects don't care about WordPress, and WordPress doesn't really care about .htaccess redirects. All you need to concern yourself with is the URL as seen in the browser: if you want to redirect (and WP itself doesn't provide an adequate mechanism to do so) then you do that with a Redirect directive or mod_rewrite; as long as you instruct it to perform an external redirect, like with [R=301], then WordPress/your code won't even know it happened.