I hadn't made a custom one and set a bunch of redirects in htaccess. Well it turns out I was get server 500 errors if something wasnt found rather than redirecting to the homepage (which isnt good either). No I have a successful 404 page and it has a delayed redirect to my main page. How important do you think this is to prevent the crawlers from seeing errored pages and duplicate content? Very important? Or not so much?
404 pages?
- Thread starter Quamz0
- Start date
Conor
Elite Member
- Nov 7, 2012
- 3,621
- 6,217
Personally, I'd try avoid the server 500 errors alltogether. Create a proper 404 page, and redirect any pages that don't exist on your site anymore to their relative "New" pages, or simply to the homepage. There is nothing wrong with Google seeing a 404 page though, if the page never has and never will exist. I wouldn't even bother with the delayed redirect on your 404 pages.
The site is very small and static, but every so often I see http://www.webpage.com/=34? or something else pointing to the main webpage, I start to think maybe I get a small hit for duplicate content if I auto redirect all wrong urls to the home page, so I setup the 404 and fixed the 500 errors, so no more 500 errors and a static 404 landing page, maybe I'll see a serp improvement, cant hurt right? lol