Lincoln Computer Club Forum

[divingbrit]

Been playing with some of the extras supplied by our computer club web site host , in their cgi script dir.
One of those includes custom made 404 page, sounds good, but did you know this then turns the 404 error from a 'hard' error 404 to a 'soft' 404 error.

So why should we worry, well if you try to get google to crawl all your pages, not just the first few, you need to supply a 'site.map.xml' and you then fall foul of a soft 404

Here is what google says on its site

>Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 2:54 PM
>We see two kinds of 404 ("File not found") responses on the web: "hard 404s" and "soft 404s." We discourage the use of so-called "soft 404s" because they can be a confusing experience for users and search engines. Instead of returning a 404 response code for a non-existent URL, websites that serve "soft 404s" return a 200 response code. The content of the 200 response is often the homepage of the site, or an error page

ok, bit confusing, but possibly you should refrain from using 'soft 404s' I have spent the day , (off work this week and spending it in front of the computer) getting our site higher up those google rankings!

[Adam.]

You can prevent search engines from picking up your 404 error pages by using the robots meta tag in the head of your html file.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX" />