No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
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I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage.
So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url"
Is this good or bad or not an issue?
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URLs that don't exist should display an error page and return a 404 (not found) response.
When you have made-up URLs going to an actual page that returns a 200 (OK) response, the problem actually is that Google will start seeing this as soft 404 errors, which is not good.
From Google Search Console: "Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted..."
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This is cause for duplicate content concerns unless you specifically have tagged this type of page as no-index or included a rel-canonical tag pointing to your homepage. You would not want a 404 page being indexed.
I think your best option is to create a functioning 404 error page without your homepage content or to designate the pages no-index with the following tag.
Hope this helps.
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GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
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Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6653
Connection: close
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