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Revisiting 404 Error Pages That Show 200 Codes
February 22, 2006
We just keep running into clients whose error pages return incorrect (either 200 or 302-then-200) header codes. Because Google Sitemaps won't let you validate a sitemap file if your server is misconfigured, I thought it was worth another mention.
Johannes Meuller has an excellent article about making sure that your error pages return the correct codes. Unlike a lot of articles in the genre, it gives specific code to fix the situation, covering Windows ASP and Apache servers as well as PHP pages.
As I pointed out here, there are reasons beyond Google Sitemaps for making sure your error page(s) return the correct 404 error code.
If you're in doubt about your error page header codes, test it by plugging in a "fake" URL from your site (such as www.domain.com/xxxxxxx) into a header checker tool. Rex Swain has one of the best. Don't let looks deceive you. Plenty of custom error pages LOOK like they're 404 pages (with all the requisite "File not found" terminology), but they're still throwing bad header codes.
Meuller, the article of the article above, is also the author of a terrific program that generates XML files for use as Google Sitemaps.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at February 22, 2006 11:43 PM
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Comments
Are there SEO implications?
Posted by: rick at July 2, 2008 08:39 AM