Posted by wd on 02/19/06 02:00

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:59:10 +0000, Peter Fox wrote:

> Following on from wd's message. . .
>
> Is 404 the most suitable 400-series status code?

It would either have to be 404 or 410. Google spidered about 250 URLs on
the site that have duplicate content like this:

http://www. my_site .com/index.php?p=12345
http://www. my_site .com/index.php?p=23456
http://www. my_site .com/index.php?p=239fj
http://www. my_site .com/index.php?p=29fks
http://www. my_site .com/index.php?p=20fks

I need those kinds of pages removed from Google's cache. Those pages
don't exist so Google thinks there are 250 web pages with the same content
as the home page. The site is being penalized because of it. From what
I've read on Google's webmaster guidelines, Google will only remove them
if it finds a 404 error message. Apparently, a 410 header will work also.

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