404 Custom Page - Should it be nofollow?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I have a few questions related to 404 custom page.

1. Should I Nofollow, Noindex the custom 404 page from Meta's or not?

2. What is the best practice? (I checked a lot of big sites but could not find a clear cut solution as half of them had nofollow while others do not.)

lastly,

3. Are there any negative effects if I do not put a nofollow, noindex?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

I can't imagine that it matters at all. The important thing (for whatever urls triggered the error) is the 404 status in the http header. The content of the custom error page doesn't get indexed if the status is returned correctly, no matter the presence or absence of a robots meta tag.

If the http status is incorrectly set to 200 OK, you've got much bigger problems than Google indexing the content or following links - you've got the potential for taking your site completely down the drain.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Thanks for the reply Tedster.

The HTTP status returned is 404 for the error page. So I guess it is fine then.

[g1smd]

I always meta "noindex" the 404 page so that if it is directly accessed at example.com/404.html it does not get indexed.

[tedster]

Interesting, g1smd. I can understand why you might do that. I never have, and I also never had a custom error page show up in the index. I just checked a few sites, and it's still that way.

Do you use noindex,follow or noindex,nofollow?

[g1smd]

Just "noindex", because I do want links out to be followed however that page was accessed.

[rowtc2]

For 404 i use metatag noindex,nofollow.
Let's make things simple,why to risk ,what benefit you have if is indexed? A very small benefit in comparation with risk.