I have custom 404 page and getting so much 404 error on Google webmaster, what should i do?

[rimon5693]

I have a custom 404 page with popular post and category links in the page, everyday i have 404 crawl error on webmaster tools, what should i do?

[NakulGoyal]

The pages that the webmaster tools are reporting, when you click on them, do you see the 404 pages ? Are these pages supposed to be 404's ? Something like Out of stock, discontinued products or services etc ? Also, click on the details and see how is Google finding these pages. Are these included in the sitemap or are they linked from somewhere ? Are those links internal that you control or external ?

If internal, change/update/remove those links. If external, can you send a request to the website owner to update them or do a 301 redirect for that page to a relevant page if you have one.

I hope this helps.

[Unity]

Hi Rafiqul,

I recently saw the same issue with one of my clients and the reason was that the 404 error page wasn't a true 404 error page, it was a 404 soft error page (which means the http header response code was a 200 OK meaning it's not a 404 - remember that a page can look however you want but unless server-side is using the correct header response etc then it's not a true 404). This page explains it better http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=181708

Davinia