The sitemaps verfication detects scripts that return 200 for 404 pages, this obiviously means a database site would never quite be able to get out of this. If I make a 404 and do a redirect the second request returns a 200 which google sitemaps still picks up. The only way around this was to generate a 404 page inside my 404 script and split the headers off. Now I have a working 404 page, but I want to redirect it, the only way I can work out how to do this is meta-refresh tag. Will this affect my ranking "fixing" this sitemaps issue with meta-refresh if it's set to 5 seconds on a 404 page?
