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In my asp.net web site I have custom error pages defined as following in my web.config file.

<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="~/defaulterror.htm" >
<error statusCode="404" redirect="~/404.htm" />

When file is not found it correctly display 404.htm page but the issue is when I do Fiddler trace it returns 302 as HTTP status code.This is a big issue for search engine page indexing due to this lot of broken links still have been indexed recently because of this in my web site. how can I prevent returning 302 as HTTP status code for file not found errors and return 404 for file not found errors.I am using asp.net 3.5.

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  • 1
    See this post, which is an example of a custom 404 error page solution using ASP.Net MVC filter attributes. This solution also avoids the 302 / 200 messages to the browser. The browser gets a 404 response. Commented Nov 1, 2011 at 14:16

5 Answers 5

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20

After Googling about this issue, it seems that this is the default behavior that Microsoft ASP.NET provides for the situation. This is very bad for SEO. A work around I found is to check whether the requested file exists in an HTTP handler (or global.asax file), or use: 

<customErrors mode="On" redirectMode="ResponseRewrite">
    <error statusCode="404" redirect="/FileNotFound.aspx" />
</customErrors>

If the requested file does not exist, then rewrite the request path to a file not found page (if using an HTTP handler or global.asax), clear the server errors on the 404 error page code behind, and add a 404 error header to the response manually rather than waiting for server to do so.

Server.ClearError();
Response.Status = "404 Not Found";
Response.StatusCode = 404;
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4 Comments

redirectMode attribute was added in .NET FW 4.0, at least!
This is perfect. The URL stays on the same page, but now I get the proper 404 status code.
hey can you make this full example. i don't get this one.
If you have a project that isn't up to ASP.NET 4 yet, you can also use this great solution in your Global.asax for 2.0 and 3.0 projects: blog.stormid.com/2009/08/…
3

In ASP.NET 4.0 you can use redirectMode="ResponseRewrite" to send nice error pages and the proper HTTP code.

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I wouldn't call the error codes "proper". Using this, a not-found error will result in an HTTP status code of 200.
0

As you probably already know the 302 response is used to advise the caller that the requested resource has been moved to a different location.

When you see, in Fiddler, the 302 http code being returned is there also a 'location' declaration in the header? For example:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.yoursite.com/somewhere/blah.htm

It seems that you may have 'something' on the webserver that is intercepting the 404 returns and replacing these with 302's. I know this isn't much to go on but I would suggest that you look at the IIS configuration for the site.

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0

If you add the following to your 404 page code behind. You will get the correct results -

Page 404.aspx

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.StatusCode = 404;
}
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-3

The solution was even simpler.. Please check out my response over here: http://blog.hebbink.com/post/2010/12/14/NET-custom-404-error-page-returns-302-for-http-status.aspx

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2 Comments

And hence the importance of including the solution in the answer (as well as the link) - they no longer seem to have a blog.
Many things are very ironic about this site: * it was built on ASP * <meta name="description" content=" Our site has been renewed and because of this the page is no longer found …"> * <meta name="keywords" content="renewed, because, longer, found, “> * <meta property="og:title" content="Hebbink.com | Um website profissional por um preço accessível”> (A professional website for an accessible price)

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