No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?

[Rich_Coffman]

I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage.

So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url"

Is this good or bad or not an issue?

[Chris_Hickman]

This is cause for duplicate content concerns unless you specifically have tagged this type of page as no-index or included a rel-canonical tag pointing to your homepage. You would not want a 404 page being indexed.

I think your best option is to create a functioning 404 error page without your homepage content or to designate the pages no-index with the following tag.

Hope this helps.

[Linda-Vassily]

URLs that don't exist should display an error page and return a 404 (not found) response.

When you have made-up URLs going to an actual page that returns a 200 (OK) response, the problem actually is that Google will start seeing this as soft 404 errors, which is not good.

From Google Search Console: "Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted..."