Page Not Found… or was it?
Recently I was helping a client of mine with her website and noticed some strange things happening as AutoMapIt spidered her site(details excluded to protect the innocent). Many pages were coming up as \’OK\’ while the text on them read something like \”Page not found, please return to the index page and try again\”. Although the automated check that AutoMapIt provides for this showed that her SERVER was returning the correct 404 for ridiculous files such as quijibo869.htmlqrst, if the script that listed the articles was given a bum article, the page said \”error\” to a human, but returned \”OK\” to the search engines… after all an error page WAS being found and returned instead of a themed article.
After some URLs changed, the old ones in my system began to take on a new life of their own. All of a sudden the site-wide theme tool on AutoMapIt was showing that her site was about \”page not found\”. When I checked the HTTP headers coming from some of her pages, it showed a status code of 200 (OK, Page Found).
what can you expect after fixing this sort of problem? You will likely see the count of your pages fall dramatically in the search engines after this, but your ranking for \’real\’ terms may come up as a result of them no longer seeing your site as having a theme related to \”page not found\” (or whatever page text you use). The pages that drop off the search engine will not be real pages, but an endless string of pages that tell humans \”Error\” but tell the search engines \”ok\”.
If you are after \”quality above quantity\”, please use the HTTP Header Checker on this site to test your error pages. If you don\’t see a 404, but instead see a 200… you\’re in trouble. I know that in PHP, this can be fixed by adding a header() function that sends a proper 404 error code on your error pages before any text is output to the browser. The key point here is \”before any text is output to the browser\”.
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