Webmaster Tools Says My 404 Page Has Problems

[brnm98105]

Recently, while using google webmaster tools, Google said.

Last attempt Dec 31, 2008: We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header.

Im concerned should I be adding somthins speacial to my custom 404 page? Also can I remove orshould I remove the META tag Google had me upload?

I ran "Live HTTP Headers" in Firefox

Heres what it says

http://www.example.com/blank.htm

GET /blank.htm HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 302 Found

Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:28:17 GMT

Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)

Location: http://www.example.com/notfound.htm

Content-Length: 316

Keep-Alive: timeout=30

Connection: Keep-Alive

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

----------------------------------------------------------

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=6-1500027947&features=Rank&q=info:www.example.com/notfound.htm&num=100&filter=0

GET /search?client=navclient-auto&ch=6-1500027947&features=Rank&q=info:www.example.com/notfound.htm&num=100&filter=0 HTTP/1.1

Host: toolbarqueries.google.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 2.0.114-big; Windows XP 5.1)

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Cookie: PREF=ID=7474f0808a666e53:TM=1231013109:LM=1231013109:S=p_IrNQHvvIbivbpt; NID=18=ZCePewixjcJLlHPktosu5z4JTMTACPOm8NrjYZ_AT3sBxmQAqCrZTLNrPC-9S1Eu7JIfwgm8MqgKa4h577aS2zxlbQGhfdWBuin1OFjyqK7i0o9DrBizpRLpmxGnVitw

HTTP/1.x 200 OK

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0

Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:28:18 GMT

Expires: -1

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Server: gws

Content-Length: 0

I dont really understand this can anyone helpme.

[edited by: tedster at 7:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2009]
[edit reason] de-link the example url [/edit]

[tedster]

Focus on the HTTP/1.x lines - that's the http status code. The first one, returned during the request for http://www.example.com/blank.htm says "302". So you're using a temporary redirect to your custom error page. Then, three lines below that, the server gives the url for that custom page, "Location: http://www.example.com/notfound.htm"

But the second http status code in the information above is for the request sent by your browser to the Google toolbar url. The information you copied stops before the lines that report on the server's response for the http://www.example.com/notfound.htm request.

That's where the problem will be - further along in the reported information. The HTTP/1.x line for that request will probably say "200" instead of "404". If so, you need a server configuration change.

[g1smd]

Your handling of URLs that don't exist, is not configured correctly.

It might be that your

ErrorDocument

directive contains a domain name. In that case it will send an incorrect response as documented in the Apache help files. The correct syntax is:

ErrorDocument 404  /some-file-name

[tedster]

I was just prowling around in Webmaster Tools and noticed that Google has introduced a special Enhanced 404 tool [google.com] that you can make use of. For some webmaster's this might be the easiest and quickest route to a resolution.

This new widget (still under development) can give your 404 request a "closest page" result, pulled from Google's own data about your site.

[g1smd]

That feature is only a month or so old. I haven't looked at it in detail, and there's a longer thread about in on WebmasterWorld.

[jdMorgan]

There's likely nothing Google can do to help with this. It's almost certainly caused by either a misconfigured server, incorrect .htaccess code, or a bad script.

Jim