Good point about particular sites that have few, quickly expiring auctions. It seems that each site’s individual characteristics need to be addressed before coming up with a 404 solution for it.

Thanks again.

Yes I’ve heard of the Smart 404 solution (as you can see I linked to that plugin in this post, but didn’t really go into any detail about it). The reason I prefer the phpbay solution on some sites is that I have some that are only updating 1-2 auctions per day, and since most of them expire within 7 days (and are auto-deleted), there isn’t a ton of content on those sites at any given time, so the chances of a post matching a visitors search query aren’t all that good (depending on the broadness of the niche), and using phpbay is a good way to ensure the visitor finds what they’re looking for.

And don’t worry, I don’t consider it a cock-block! Haha. Thanks for reading.

In the case where someone comes to the site from a broken link on another site, and not from a search engine, I defer to the Smart 404 code, like so:

if(!empty($keywords)) {PHPBAY STUFF HERE}
else{SMART 404 STUFF HERE}

Keep up the great work, your posts are always incredibly informative.

The Auction2Post version of the PremiumNews theme’s 404 page makes use of a function named “smart404_loop”, which, with a quick Google search, was found to be from the Smart 404 plugin(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/)

After installing and activating this free plugin and going to a url that does not exist, I was presented with a pretty good list of pages on my site that contain terms from the 404 url. I’m thinking this works best (or only) if your permalink structure is set to /%postname%/ .

Again, look to the A2P PremiumNews 404 page to see a good implementation of how to show the pages that Smart 404 returns, as the examples given in the Smart 404 plugin are pretty weak.

I didn’t mean to c**k-block your affiliate link to phpBay. I own phpBay myself, and any reader that has Auction2Post should absolutely own phpBay, and buy it through the link above. If you don’t own phpBay, you are leaving money on the table.