Would Google ban site for this?

Does ErrorDocument 404 cause Google Ban?

[seowisdom]

I've had lots of sites disappear from the Google index, and presumed it was due to TrafficEqualizer pages on them.

But I just saw this thread in another forum... this is exactly what we do, so any 'page not found' automatically redirects to the home page. We do this on every site by putting this in .htaccess

ErrorDocument 404 [domainname.com...]

Here's the thread I saw. Would Google ban each site due to this simple error code?

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It happened to me and what is funny? It was a site that was TOTALLY full of content ... the reason my site (I think) was banned is that I made a change to the way my site handled custom error pages (instead of getting a page not found, I created a custom page) ... but my custom page worked this way ... instead of an error? I sent the user back to the main page and from what I was told, that kind of "redirecting / forwarding" is "frowned upon" by Google. So within DAYS of doing that ... BAM ... site disappeared from Google never to be seen again <grin>

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