Customised 404 Error Page, Google says it is displaying code 200 Options

[Eric "Render...]

When in doubt, it's always best to check with your webhost providor before you waste hours trying to guess what the thing to do is. I have two books on how to make my own 404 message and they were both wrong.

When I wrote in to my rep, he gave me the right code. I could have saved hours if I asked him first...

This post has been edited by Randy: Oct 7 2005, 01:29 PM

[qwerty]

When I wrote in to my rep, he gave me the right code. I could have saved hours if I asked him first...

I'm afraid that's probably the exception rather than the rule. Far too many of the customer support people I've dealt with at hosting companies have no idea what they're talking about.

I used to have my own site hosted by a company where the underlings were useless, but the head of the support department was great. He could fix anything, he understood your problem before you finished explaining it, he could be reached at practically any time. He left the company, and the service there got worse and worse, to the point where I'd talk to three people over the course of the day and all three would have different takes on what I was talking about. I'm not with them anymore (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Yesterday I was talking to a client's host. They're switching their server from Win to 'Nix, and that's going to mean switching file types from asp to htm. I told them I'd need access to the .htaccess file to 301 the old URLs to the new ones, and it took four explanations before they got it. They kept thinking I meant that the pages would still be asp, but I wanted them to be parsed as htm, and told me it would make more sense to actually make them htm (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

BTW, when we make the switch, I will be checking with Randy (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Randy]

(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/hysterical.gif) Or Ron or Chris or Alan or, or, or...

This is one of those subjects, unfortunately, that is very tough to generalize about. But I'll give it a shot.

Hosting people know hosting. They know what's best for the server. Their underling's know considerably less because they're usually just getting started out having never actually run a server themselves; and often don't have the type of access needed to pull some things off, for fear that they might really frag up something without realizing the danger.

It's a very specialized discipline that I do not claim to know everything about.

SEO/SEM/iMarketing is the same way. It's very specialized and requires a lot of knowledge in some circumstances that simply isn't out there. As we all know. I also do not claim to know much about this, other than what I've experienced personally.

Add on top and there are certain things a host can do --with totally good intentions-- that can have a very negative effect to the SEO/SEM side of things.

There's just no way to get a handle on all of these very specialized elements unless one has gone through them before. That's life.

Just my opinon here, but I think this is exactly the reason that Jill has taken the care to assemble the crew that she has and why you see the level of expertise in the community that you do here at HR. Because there are so many elements at play it's simply impossible for any single person to have experience or expertise in every area.

Because of this --between all of us-- staff and members alike, we can usually work out the best possible solution.

[kpdelvalle]

So does anyone here know the magic trick for a static .htm page on a Windows server? My custom 404 also returns 200 OK instead of 404.

[Randy]

I'm sure Chris, Ian or one of the other IIS wizards will be along soon, but here's something I had bookmarked from the MS Developer Journal regarding custom errors for IIS.

It starts out talking about using an ASP page as your custom error page, which is one way to do it to make sure the page delivers a 404 error. Down at the very bottom it talks about using File instead of URL as the message type in the Error Mapping Properties.

[chrishirst]

Using URL and a relative address for the error page is the thing that causes the 200 response rather than a 404.
If it is set to "File" and a physical path used to identify the error page IIS will correctly send a 404 response.