[wp-hackers] Should Monthly Archive Pages ever return 404?

[Lynne Pope]

Sorry, but I have to ask this...
If no posts existed for a monthly archive, where are the URL's to the
archive coming from? How would people end up following an URL to a
non-existent page?

The only place I can see the potential for this happening is if a site is
using a calendar that outputs links to non-existent archives. Surely that,
then is a calendar issue which should be fixed?

Call me dim if you like, but I just cant see how creating virtual pages for
non-existent content helps anyone (least of all search engines trying to
index content).

Lynne