404 Theft

Question

Certain malware, such as AVG , spans 404 pages to render a page in a browser riddled with their own ads. The only work I discovered is to drop 404 http status codes for custom error pages in my web application.

Is there any other job?

Edit:

Does anyone know of any other toolbars / programs that also capture 404 pages without checking if they are common error pages or not?

Is there a way to detect the presence of AVG from the query string or otherwise? (I guess not)

I created a petition here in AVG .

Answer 1

It is not your fault and, of course, it is not your responsibility. Keep HTTP status codes, they are useful. If some of your users decide to install a browser plugin that processes 404 status codes, do not try to bypass it.

This blog has a Google Webmaster Central blog entry :

[...] confusing for users, and in addition, search engines can spend most of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicate URLs on your site. This can adversely affect your site’s crawl reach - due to the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs cannot be detected as quickly or frequently visited.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

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