No 404 = $ but…

Hi Chirag,

Thanks for the feedback. The plugin does register visits as a 404, so it should help you get those pages removed from Google. This is one of the only 404 plugins that actually does that. If you have other information please send it to me so I can optimize this. ?? [email protected]

A quick check at https://404checker.com/404-checker tells that anypage on site that does not exists gives 302 response

Also, example.com/item-not-found/ gives 200 OK

No 404 is picture anywhere.

Google is corroborating my concern. I was seeing strange behavior since I changed several product urls. Even after two days of submitting a sitemap, google did not remove old urls.
Some further reading:
https://www.mcanerin.com/en/articles/301-redirect-404-error.asp

Quoting from the reference above:

“The problem is that if you use a redirect to pass PR from an error page to a normal page, the redirecting page will usually return a “200 OK” or 302 Redirect code, rather than a proper 404. This messes up search engines and can result in a whole bunch of indexed URL’s all looking to the search engine like duplicates of your home page (there is no redirect code, it’s a pure 200 OK)

This is bad for your site. Additionally, there are a LOT of indexed “error” pages in search engines (especially Yahoo) that should not be there.”

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Very interesting… Can you give me a link to your site so I can take a look? I definitely want to figure this out because it’s an important piece of the plugin that I was pretty sure was working properly.

In testing my site returned the proper 404 error, but I’ve since wiped the site and don’t have a proper dev environment set up for this plugin at the moment. If you’re using Chrome, you should be able to use your network tools to see what status is being given. It could be that there’s an error with the logic that I missed.