404 appearing in Sitelinks

[mccormackmorrison]

I am little embarresed to say that the custom 404 page is appearing in a client's Sitelinks for their brand name search term.

I have demoted this page from Sitelinks for the brand term but it still appears

What is the best practise for a custom 404 page appearing in a sitemap and/or being blocked by robots.txt?

Thanks

[NakulGoyal]

The best best in my opinion would be to do a 301 redirect for the 404 URL to the correct/updated page if you have one.

[mccormackmorrison]

Thanks Nakul - but the issue is with the 404 page itself being indexed (as it appears in the sitemap), then this page being used as one of the sitelinks for a brand search term.

I agree 301 should be put in place for any 404s seen on the site

[NakulGoyal]

What I mean to say is that within a few days after the 301 is set, Google will either update the URL or if they find a better page that should be the site-link instead of the new 301'd URL, it will update. It's just sort of seemless. Did that a couple months ago and worked like a charm.

[timhatton]

Just thinking - does the 404 page return a correct 404 response in the header? i.e. make sure it's not returning a 200 ("this is a legit page") response

[mccormackmorrison]

Thanks Tim, great shout. Just checked and you were right. Bit slap on the wrists all round.

Thanks again!