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HTTP 404 for 404-page?

Moz Pro

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Partouter last edited by

Hi Mozzers!

SEOmoz just finished crawling one of my websites and this crawl found 3 errors. One of these errors was the (custom) 404-page, because of the http-status 404.

What's you suggestion about this? Should a 404-page have a status 404?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
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KeriMorgret last edited by

That's one where you do want a 404 returned! That should be fine, and kudos to you for having made a custom page.
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john4math last edited by

If it returns a 200 OK code, it can be indexed as a page and may appear in search results, which isn't great since you don't really want to be bringing people in to your 404 page. According to Wikipedia, this is a "Soft 404". Since there is a section under Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools for Soft 404's, I take it that it's better to return a 404 code.
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