200 for Site Visitors, 404 for Google (but possibly 200?)

[Prospector-Plastics]

A 2nd question we have about another site we're working with...

Currently if a visitor to their site accesses a page that has no content in a section, it shows a message saying that there is no information currently available and the page shows 200 for the user, but shows 404 for Google.

They are asking us if it would be better to change the pages to 200's for Google and what impact that might have considering there would be different pages displaying the same 'no information here' message.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Thanks Mike - yes, I believe this only happens on results pages on their site.

Good point on the cloaking - good thing to think about as well.

Sounds like disallowing in robots.txt is the 1st thing they should do, then they can remove the pages resulting in 404s which they can then manage through GWM.

[MikeRoberts]

Ah... its a search results page. Generally speaking, best practices for internal search results pages is to disallow them in robots.txt as Google usually considers is disfavorable to have search results appear in search results. What I'd really worry about here is that it could accidentally be viewed as cloaking since you're serving Google something completely different than you're serving human visitors. (Though a manual reviewer should see that you aren't doing it with malicious intent)

Does this only happen on search results pages?

[SL_SEM]

If it were me, I would serve up the 200, but any time a "no-content" page was served up under a different URL I would use a canonical tag to point Google to a standard /no-content page.

This is an easy way to tell google "hey these are all really the same page, and serve the same purpose as /no-content. Please treat them as one page in your index, and do not count them as spammy variants."

[Prospector-Plastics]

Thank you Mike. I was leaning towards your hypothesis and it's good to see you're thinking the same thing.

Here is an example page with information from one of their site developers - hoping this might help as it appears it is not a custom 404 page.

If you disable javascript and set your USER_AGENT to googlebot you will get a 404.
http://bit.ly/1aoroMu 

Any other insight you have would be most appreciated - thx!

[MikeRoberts]

Have you checked the HTTP header status code shown to users and are you sure that its not just a custom 404 page? Could you give a specific URL as an example?

If the page doesn't exist and only offers a small amount of info like that then making it a 200 across the site when Googlebot sees it would cause Google to view it likely as duplicate thin content or a Soft 404. So a real 404, if it is in fact a 404, is the correct thing to do.