Thread: Fake 404 error page

Our webmaster tools account is full of messages from Google stating that our 404 not found page really does not return a 404 http header.

We moved from another platform to ASPDNSF and are having issues with old URLs still getting indexed. It is important for Google to know that the pages do not exist so they can be removed from the index.

I have found this article explaining how to do it and I don't think ASPDNSF handles this issue properly.

http://weblogs.asp.net/paxer/archive...4-and-seo.aspx

How can I fix this issue? I am not a programmer.

Thanks!

Have you built a 404 error page to redirect the page to if it's not found?

If so then that should be ok. Following these should help

Custom Error Pages



Synopsis
By modifying the web.config file, you can create custom error pages so that when errors are encountered, your customers see friendlier notices than server errors and basic 404- and 500-type errors.


Procedure
First, find the "customErrors mode" section of the web.config file. That can be changed to "On" (displays your custom pages to all viewers), "RemoteOnly" (displays custom errors to remote viewers, and the actual error to local viewers for debugging purposes), or "Off" (displays ugly error messages to everyone).

You can specify the custom error page(s) in 2 ways:

1 - A line like <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="/error.html"/> will direct any customers who get an error to www.yoursite.com/error.html. You can create a friendly generic "an error was encountered" page to cover all issues.

2 - You can specify a redirect page for each error type like this:

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly">
<error statusCode="403" redirect="/accessdenied.html" />
<error statusCode="404" redirect="/pagenotfound.html" />
</customErrors mode>

This is what I have:

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly">
<!-- This will redirect 404 error on PageNotFound.aspx ,this will work only for file-types that IIS passes to ASP.NET -->
<error statusCode="404" redirect="PageNotFound.aspx" />
</customErrors>

but that does not generate a real 404 http code but a 200.

medsupply,

Did you ever get an answer to this "404" problem? I'm struggling with the same thing and find it hard to search through the forums because it appears I can't search on "404" or "302." I've stumbled on a few responses and found one person willing to help me out. I'm close but still can't get it quite right. I can generate a "real" 404 with our page template but the info area of the page is blank or I can generate a real 404 with a completely blank page with a brief message. Neither of these is ideal and neither seems to work properly in InternetExplorer.

So, I'm continuing to work on this. Looks like some code changes are necessary in showproduct.aspx.cs and maybe in driver.aspx.cs.

This seems really silly because everyone using Aspdnsf must have to delete products from time to time and if they are indexed they are generating these errors at Google which can't be good for SEO.

For your forum search problem you want to use BFG 9000's custom search solution found in this thread.

That is great! Thank you very much.

Tom