If it's an invalid URL then yes, you should display a 404 page and make sure you return a 404 header using CFContent or CFLocation. That way search engines will know to remove the page from their indexes.

Our approaches are actually the same. but BKBK goes further. The onMissingTemplate method will never fire in this case, as the page you're rewriting to actually exists, so what you're doing here is manually raising a 404. There are two ways of doing this; firstly you just do something like this:

<cfif FoundItems.RECORDCOUNT EQ 0 >

   <cflocation url="/404.cfm" addtoken="false" statuscode="404" />

</cfif>

This will let people know that they've entered an invalid URL, and the statuscode will tell search engines that there's no page there.

What BKBK is suggesting is perhaps being more intelligent. Rather than just throwing them at a standard 404 page, try and handle it a little better. In your page where you would normally show the results, try and find any relevant results. See if there are any keywords in the URL you can search the database for, and display the links to those products on the page. Nothing groundbreaking here, just something a little more "web 2.0" than just saying "no, there's nothing here".

The only difference would be that you want to do this:

<cfheader statuscode="404" />

...before then going on to display your page. This is purely for the search engines.

Hope that explains it a little.

O.

It sounds like your onMissingTemplate method isn't set up properly then, as the sole purpose of it is to show your own error page rather than a built-in one.

I'd suggest reading up on that, plenty of info out there.