HTTP 404 for 404-page?

[Partouter]

Hi Mozzers!

SEOmoz just finished crawling one of my websites and this crawl found 3 errors. One of these errors was the (custom) 404-page, because of the http-status 404.

What's you suggestion about this? Should a 404-page have a status 404?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[john4math]

If it returns a 200 OK code, it can be indexed as a page and may appear in search results, which isn't great since you don't really want to be bringing people in to your 404 page.  According to Wikipedia, this is a "Soft 404".  Since there is a section under Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools for Soft 404's, I take it that it's better to return a 404 code.

[KeriMorgret]

That's one where you do want a 404 returned! That should be fine, and kudos to you for having made a custom page.