Handling access denied pages?

Get Started
1

hello
i have some restricted sections on my website and have been thinking how to handle them, essentially i have 2 choices, but i don’t know which is better for the user and the search engines:
is it better to turn the restricted page into a access denied page or to redirect the user to a access denied page?

the difference between the 2 is that in one case the user is not redirected anywhere and just sees different content on the same page, while on the other case the user is redirected to a different page that has the sole purpose of being a access denied page.

im just wondering which is better for the user, his browser and the search engines?

p.s. both cases will have a “401 Access denied” header.

2

For security purposes, both. For SEO purposes, redirection.

3

what HTTP header should the denied page serve while redirecting and what HTTP header should the login page have?

4

Why redirect? Just serve a login page with a 401 header.

5

Can’t be a 401 header
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header field (section 14.47) containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource

in my case there is no WWW-Authenticate Header as the authentication is done using PHP (similar to sitepoint for example) instead of HTTP.

so do you suggest i directly serve the page as a login page with a 403 header?

thanks for your suggestion.

edit:
what about average login pages that users might want to visit to login?

6

Ah yes, I meant to serve the login page as 403.