Can Google et. al. detect the words...

"The page cannot be found"

[HughMungus]

If not, why not? How hard is that to detect (and remove from SERPS)?

[BigDave]

Could you be a little more verbose?

[BigDave]

Okay, now I get it. You want them to get rid of pages with "the page cannot be found" on it. I'm a little dense today.

There is a way to do that. They look for a 404. If they were to remove a page just because it contains those words, this page would be removed from the SERPs.

[Tropical Island]

How about having a page that the only copy says:

This site is temporarily unavailable.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

Google has been ranking this one page site for ONE YEAR at #1 or #2 for our main term. The only copy on the page is the above.

Makes you wonder about content.

[mars9820]

well most likely that page has incoming links with anchor text.

If I were you I would try to locate the backlinks and ask that guy/girl to change the link from your competitor to you :)

[Tropical Island]

I would try to locate the backlinks and ask that guy/girl to change the link from your competitor to you

:-)))

[kaled]

I've placed a NOINDEX robots meta on my 404 page.

Kaled.

[BigDave]

I've placed a NOINDEX robots meta on my 404 page.

I have never known a search engine to include a 404 page. They only include error pages that incorrectly return a 200.

Your "404 page" does return a status of 404, doesn't it?

[rfgdxm1]

>Could you be a little more verbose?

And, a little less vague, please.

[Krapulator]

>>I've placed a NOINDEX robots meta on my 404 page.

I don't mind if my 404 DOES get indexed. It is a well designed custom 404 which has a menu, a search function and my strandard global menu. It is not the standard dead end which loses potential customers.

[jdMorgan]

> I have never known a search engine to include a 404 page. They only include error pages that incorrectly return a 200.

This is a fairly common problem on Apache, because Webmasters incorrectly specify their custom error documents using a canonical URL like:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/error_page.html

instead of the correct URL-path form:

ErrorDocument 404 /error_page.html

The former returns a 302-Found status, while the latter return 404-Not Found. Depending on the robot's interpretation, the 302 response can cause the error document to be indexed, or it can cause the original URL to be indexed with the content of the error document. The modified response code behaviour is documented in the Apache ErrorDocument description [httpd.apache.org].

It's wise to check your server's response to missing, redirected, and forbidden pages using something like the Server Headers checker [webmasterworld.com].

Jim

[HughMungus]

If I were you I would try to locate the backlinks and ask that guy/girl to change the link from your competitor to you :)

Oh, it's not for me. I just see it occassionally (on ALL search engines, Brett) and I think, "Can't they detect that?"

[HughMungus]

And, a little less vague, please.

Didn't you see the subtitle? :D

[kaled]

Your "404 page" does return a status of 404, doesn't it?

This may be a factor. I complained to my host about this about a year ago - I don't think they understood the problem - it didn't get fixed. I decided to add NOINDEX to my 404 page about a month ago. HOWEVER, at some point, my host did indeed fix this problem, my 404 page DOES return 404 now not 200. I checked just before posting.

Kaled.