I put in the URL. I ran a server page checker tool to see what status the auto-generated page was showing. page you want indexed. Display a custom 404 page when a page URL does not exist. Make sure it returns a 404 server code to give search engines a clear message. Be careful with automatically generated pages. Avoid producing nonsense or duplicate pages for search engines and users. Even if you don't have a site problem, these are good points to revisit periodically, just to be on the safe side. Oh, and never put a canonical tag on your 404 page , especially pointing to your homepage…but don't. SEO Failure #4: Rankings plummet overnight company employee list Sometimes a simple change can be a costly mistake. This story comes from an experience with one of our SEO clients. When the .org extension of their domain name became available, they picked it up. So far, so good. But their next move led to disaster. They immediately set up a 301 redirect pointing the newly acquired . org to their main .com website. Their reasoning made sense - to capture wayward visitors who might type in the wrong extension. But the next day, they called us, frantic. Their site traffic was non-existent. They didn't know why. A few quick checks revealed that their search rankings disappeared from Google overnight. It didn't take too many questions and answers to figure out what had happened. They set up the redirect without considering the risk. We dug around and discovered that .org had a sordid past. The previous owner of the .org site had used it for spamming. With the redirect, Google was attributing all that poison to the company's main site! It only took us two days to restore the site's