404 appearing in Sitelinks
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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
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Thanks Tim, great shout. Just checked and you were right. Bit slap on the wrists all round.
Thanks again!
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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