Question

I have a custom 404 error page on my apache (404.php) and it works normally, but if someone or any search engine requests the /404.php page, the server returns 200 (OK), because the page actually exists.

I have already put the Disallow: /404.php on my robots.txt file to prevent Google from indexing that page, but I’d like to return 404, including to this page request.

Is there a way to also return 404 when someone reaches the 404.php directly?

Answer 1

I just whipped this up really quickly:

<?
 header("HTTP/1.1 404");
 echo "ERROR"; // Put the contents of your 404 page here.
?>

I checked it in Chrome, and this will return a 404 code in the header, and let you write whatever you’d like to the rest of the page. Just put the header function at the beginning of the page.