404 not found page appears as 200 success in Google Fetch. What to do to correct?

[Madlena]

We have received messages in Google webmaster tools that there is an increase in soft 404 errors.

When we check the URLs they send to the 404 not found page:
For example, http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg
redirects to http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml.
When we used fetch as Google, here is what we got: .
#1 Server Response: http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:26:59 GMT
What is wrong and what shall we do?

The soft 404 errors are mainly for images that no longer exist in the server.

Thanks!

[Anti-Alex]

There's nothing to worry about. All Google is saying is that the image no longer exists and it's returning a 404 for that specific link "http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg". When Google tries to fetch the broken URL, it's getting redirected to the 404 and it's saying that it's ok. We detect a 404 page and that fetches ok. However, the actual URL it was trying (the broken image) is not there. Google will automatically remove the 404s over time and there will be no negative impacts from this.

[ThompsonPaul]

Your site is not handling "page not found" errors correctly, Madlena. Currently, when a user requests a URL that doesn't exist, your site is sending a 302 (temporary) redirect to an error page, but that error page's header is responding with a 200 status that means "page was found correctly".

You need to have your site's developer change that behaviour so that when a non-existent URL is requested, the server immediately returns a page that has a 404 not found header response (and no 302 redirect). This is necessary even if the page itself looks like a 404 error page.

ONLY by having the page return a 404 response code IN THE HEADER will that tell Google that the page doesn't actually exist and to drop the URL from the index. As Google themselves state - it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

Once this is configured properly, it's easier to keep track of these 404 errors so that you can fix them by manually 301-redirecting to a suitable page if there is one. (although this may not be the case with just images, it can be very useful in other cases.)

Hope that helps? If anything's not clear, just holler!

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, Alex. Unless the server returns an actual 404 response code in the header, search engines will not consider the page to be an error to be removed from their index. Even though the content of the page may look like an error page, the http response in the header is the only thing that determines whether the engines will treat it as a 404 error.

Paul