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I have a confusion regarding 404 Page

Suppose I've a landing page:

https://www.example.com/testing-page

The page no longer exists so what should I do with it?

Case 1: Should I redirect the URL to 

https://www.example.com/404

Or

Case 2: Should I just replace the content with a 404 page. URL remains the same, but the content is a 404.

https://www.example.com/testing-page

Which case should be used?

MrWhite
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P082
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  • What webserver are you using? Presumably you have a "static" site, so /testing-page maps to a physical file on the filesystem? – MrWhite Dec 24 '18 at 10:29

1 Answers1

2

It is better to leave the URL the same and use a 404 status at that URL.

Most web servers allow your to instead redirect to a 404 page. That is acceptable as well, but not preferred.

Either way, search engines will remove your page from their index. If you show the 404 status directly at the original URL, they will have to crawl one URL rather than two to figure out that the page is gone.

Stephen Ostermiller
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