Why Your 404’s Should Generate 404’s

I recently was looking for a sony w950 in Google and the title of the first organic listing was “Oh no! 404 - Page not found”. I was puzzled! Looked at the URL - www.sonyericsson.com - seemed like a reputable URL so all I could think was they had not configured their server to return 404 error codes when an error was generated.

Using the RankQuest Server Header Checker, sure enough, the SonyEricsson site is returning code 302 (Moved Temporarily). Unfortunately I am not interested in now searching that website to find the Sony w950 so back to Google I went.

A good lesson in why your 404’s should generate 404 error codes at the server level - so you can monitor and repair broken pages/links/URLs on a daily/weekly/monthly basis!