Is my 404 page set up correctly?

[NutcrackerBalletGifts]

HI there! In using a few different tools, and I have received varied result concerning my 404 page. In WebSite Auditor from Link Assistant, it says my page is set up incorrectly. My webmaster has told me that it is set up correctly, but at this point I'm not entirely sure what's what.  Is there another way to test it?

I guess i'm not quite sure about the jargon and what "return 404 response code" actually means.

Thanks for your help!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Esmee

Can you please provide a URL so we can check? Thanks so much!

[NutcrackerBalletGifts]

Sorry about that!

http://www.nutcrackerballetgifts.com/category.jhtm?cid=62

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Thanks! Currently, this page is returning a 200 status code, meaning that it's OK.

You need to change this status code to a 404 status code in order for it to return a 404 to crawlers.

I see your site is running on Apache - here's a resource on how to return a 404.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Linda-Vassily]

To add to Patrick's great response, this page describes what you are seeing. When you try to go to a page on your site that does not exist, you seem to correctly get an error page.

But the content of the page does not necessarily reflect the HTTP response returned by the server. Your server is saying that the page was found, although the content of the page says it wasn't found. [A 404 response from the server simply means Not Found.]

If you look in your Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Crawl Errors you will see a tab called Soft 404. A soft 404 is a page that says it is not found but is not returning an actual 404, not found, response.

[I always wondered how Google could tell--I was given the answer that if Google sees that a whole bunch of different URLs bring up the same page, which does not return a 404 response, it assumes that that page says it is an error page and labels it a soft 404.]

If you want to test whether a URL on your site is correctly returning a 404, you can use Fetch as Google to see if it returns Not Found or else there are a number of free server response checkers online.