SEO - IIS Custom Error page and CF Url Rewrite question

[mr. modus]

I have kind of an odd question for an SEO familiar person.

Here's what I've done. I have a website setup that has only one physical page, index.cfm. All the links on that site are set up to be SEO friendly. Something like: domainname.com/my-coldfusion-question. I have set up a custom 404 page in IIS to include a coldfusion page called masterRewrite. When the page is called it parses the url, queries the database and builds a page that returns to the browser. So basically ANY link that one might go to on the site always returns a page with content and the browser never gets a "Page Not Found" error.

So here's my question: When google spiders my page does it ever know that a 404 has occurred? I've tested a little bit myself by using cfhttp to go to a page that doesn't exist on the site and viewed the headers. The response header returned shows the same as a page that does actually exist. StatusCode is "200 OK." So my question is, does Google see this the same as a page that actually does exist? I originally thought that it did, but have noticed my page ranking is 0/10 and was wondering if somehow Google knows the difference despite the fact that the statuscode shows as 200.

Any insight would be great, thanks.

Michael

[Newsgroup_User]

> Any insight would be great, thanks.
>
> Michael
>


You might want to also post this question on the 'Community' list at the
House Of Fusion. I happen to know that there is a very SEO
knowledgeable person who is a regular contributor to that list.

http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/

[mr. modus · Accepted solution]

Here's what Mike Chabot from houseoffusion said:
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If the status code is 200 then Google does not know that it is a 404 error. I think they officially frown on this technique. What Google does is query a page that they know does not exist, and it they don't get a 404 they might punish your ranking. They also punish your ranking for having pages that are very similar in content under different URLs. I question the validity of using the page ranking metric as a measure of success.

-Mike Chabot