How to Handle 404s so Google Doesn’t Punish You

do they think I have doorway pages?

[beren]

I’m wondering if there is a preferred method of setting up 404 custom errors.

Right now, we generally have 404’s going to a file, which is the home page. So if someone puts in a nonexistent URL, say www.domain.com/bogus.htm (where bogus.htm is a page that doesn’t exist), they get to the home page. This is more graceful than having them get a 404 “not found”.

Been doing this for years.

I wonder if Google would be confused by this method and think that we have doorway pages. If another site linked to a non-existent page on my site, and googlebot followed the link, they would see it as a copy of my home page.

Would Google be confused and see this as an attempt by me to put in a doorway page?

If so, can I do anything about it?

[rivi2k]

this site redirects to the main page, so it cant be that big a deal.

[BigDave]

You can serve up the home page in this situation, but make sure that it still returns a 404 or 410 as the status. Or you could return a 301 redirect to the home page whenever there is a request for a non-existant page.

Whatever you do, if you are going to play these games, make sure that you either have a good robots.txt file or that you return a 404 with whatever page that you serve up when google requests the robots.txt.

I personally consider it bad form to *not* tell someone that the page is no longer there. If I follow a link to certain information, I do not want to find myself at your home page. The best choice if you move a page is to do a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one.