Camping World Grey Hat SEO Custom 404 Error Page
On the Camping World RV Sales site it looks like there’s an automated assumption any URL like https://rv.campingworld.com/IDontExist is 301 redirected to https://rv.campingworld.com/product/IDontExist.
This is NOT a good solution, (borders on grey hat SEO) there were probably thousands of 404 error issues reported under their Google Search Console, so they 301 redirected them all!
Search for the RV stock number “1664177” finds a page with that RV’s content like this:
https://rv.campingworld.com/rv/1664177
404 error pages shouldn’t be setup this way, this is Google’s advice:
No matter how beautiful and useful your custom 404 page, you probably don’t want it to appear in Google search results. In order to prevent 404 pages from being indexed by Google and other search engines, make sure that your webserver returns an actual 404 HTTP status code when a missing page is requested.
I highlighted 404 HTTP status code because currently the Camping World RV 404 error page does NOT return a 404 HTTP status code!
I guess they are trying to catch some actual errors, but it 301 redirects non-existent pages as well.
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