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Blog Post Date: Aug 24, 2006
NOT PROCESSING 404'S WILL HURT GOOGLE PAGE RANK
As I've become more and more familiar with my hosting systems etc, it dawned on me that I should check out my error pages and how they were handling all of my 404 page error information.
I was shocked and horrified to realized that we had set up catchall pages on our htaccess file. This means that we were sending all error type pages to one file (say "content-processing-.php"). When the visitor would request a file that was no longer being served, their browser would be transferred to this catchall page, which DID NOT serve an 404 Page Not found error.
I suddenly fixed this problem on my sites and then I was flooded with error logs full of pages that I had to go in and fix. These were pages that for some reason were linked to but we no longer had on the system.
I spent the better part of three days cleaning up my error logs and making sure that all reported links were properly dealt with..
Google / Yahoo check how you're processing error pages!!
During my error page log travels, I discovered that google and yahoo were sending requests for bogus pages to my server to see how my server was handling 404 error pages.
When these requests were forwarded to my catchall page, it told those engines that I wasn't processing error pages properly. I then thought to myself that my sites were probably being devalued for pagerank because of this.
It makes sense: If you're not handling your 404 error pages properly, google's not going to crawl your site as much. It gives them less confidence in your site that you're not handling your page errors properly.
I will be monitoring my error logs much closer after realizing this. I will also be monitoring my ranking in google for my keywords for the next few months.
This is a fundamental issue that never dawned on me. We thought it was pretty cool to use htaccess in the first place. As we started to learn about it, it's a powerful tool, but one that has to be used properly..
Make sure you check your error logs on a regular basis.!
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