404 errors?

What does Google think about this?

[derekwit]

I have noticed that all of my 404 errors default back to my home page. I am wandering how or what Google thinks about this. For example if you type my domain.com/home.asp you are then taken to my home.htm page. Will Google look at this as duplicate pages?

[jdMorgan]

derekwit,

As long as you return a 404 server response code, you should be OK. If, however, you return a 302, you could end up with duplicate content issues.

You can use the Server header checker [webmasterworld.com] to find out.

Jim

[derekwit]

This is a page that is not on my server. I guess this means I need to turn off 404 and make it return an error? Or what would you suggest?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Cache-Control: no-cache,no-transform
Expires: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:10:30 GMT
Vary: *
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:10:30 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 15875

[mcavic]

Yep, that'll cause you problems. Prefererably it should return a 404, and maybe a customized error message that people can see. Or, a 301 permanent redirect to your home page.

[derekwit]

My web server does not offer a 301 redirect. Should I make an error pages that says: "page has moved" or something like that?

Any suggestions please...

[jdMorgan]

derekwit,

Suggestion: Not to be flippant, but... Get a new server?

Until that becomes feasible, you should ask your hosting provider how to fix the problem. Or tell them to fix the problem, since it is their restrictions which prevent you from fixing it.

This will only become a big problem if you change a lot of file names or delete a lot of files. Otherwise, Google will never see your 404 handling.

There are several threads running around here which include (but may not be directed at) returning modified server headers using PERL, PHP, ASP, and CGI scripts. If any of those are options for you, they would be worth searching for.

Jim

[Dave_T]

We changed our html's into cfm's about two dances ago and put a custom 404 that has links to all my new pages. It seems like google started to removing the old pages from their index.

Dave

[jdMorgan]

Yes, you have many options with handling missing pages, but not if you can't return a proper 404-Not Found server response. And that is derekwit's problem here.

Jim