Does Google understand meaning of "not found?"

Page content says removed, but G doesnt know or think so

[arnarn]

Over the last 4 months, we've seen a few sites begin to rank higher than us when using Google's inurl:ourdomainname.com (for discussion, let's call them the "othersite.com")

With respect to the "othersite.com", we noticed they were using "ourdomainname.com" in one of their url's and we followed their "remove url" procedure.

They removed (about a month ago) our information (our scraped home page), but still kept the url containing our domain name e.g.: othersite.com/ourdomainname.com". The CONTENT of their page (instead of our scraped home page) now contains text such as "no information on url was found" BUT their page HEADER shows it returned with 302 FOUND/200 OK instead of what we'd like to see which as a a 404 or 410.

But, Google does not seem to understand the content of that page and goes with the 200 OK. If you read the content of the page displayed, it's obvious there is no relevant information for ourdomain.com, so why does Google continue to show their page?

Should we be concerned, or just ignore it?
.

[edited by: tedster at 8:48 pm (utc) on July 25, 2007]
[edit reason] diasble graphic smile faces [/edit]

[theBear]

That return does not say 404 or 410 in fact it says hey it's over there.

They won't rank for on page factors but for off page stuff such as .... if you get my drift.

[arnarn]

and that's why I'd like to see Google not index or otherwise accept urls containing "domainname" that:

* returns such information/CONTENT as "no information available",

* Or, for that matter a url containing "domainname" which returns a page and indicates "domainname.com has requested us not to list information about their site",

* Or, for that matter, a url containing a domainname which returns CONTENT which is scraped from domainname.

This is different than a web site reviewing or otherwise having pages/content commenting about domainname. My concern is specifically with urls that contain "domainname" and return CONTENT like the examples above.

Again, maybe I should not be concerned when I see other sites using our domainname in their urls which return CONTENT like the examples above?

.

[theBear]

You should devise a method of detecting such things and sell it to the search engines.

It might not be as easy as you think. Then again it might be easier than I think.

I don't know any of the specifics of this case, however, I am more than slighty aware of all of the server and site mis configurations out there.

Maybe the other site is simply being operated by folks that are clueless in certain areas. It has been known to happen.

[Lord Majestic]

What may well be happening is that some valuable content that Google thinks is very relevant turned into 404 - this can happen, however this is exactly what Cache feature is for, so removing potentially very relevant match only because it is no longer found (maybe temporary issues on server) is not a very wise thing to do from search engines point of view.

HTTP result codes were not designed for search engines - they have to look for the lowest common denominator and assume what is best for search engine users.