Custom 404 question

Hello,

I had an old website and now created a new one with this theme. The old website was build on the Symfony framework. As a result many links from the old website now go to the theme’s default 404 page on the new website since they don’t exist anymore. Which is great.
However, I noticed Google/Bing/Yahoo is crawling all these old pages and I’m not sure when the search engines go to the theme’s default 404 page they recognize that they are on fact on a 404 page and not just a default content page. Since I want the search engines to de-index these old pages I need to be sure they are seeing them as 404’s.

Do I need to add a response code inside the 404 php page ( such as http_response_code(404); ) or will the search engines understand it is in fact a 404 page?

Thanks!

• This topic was modified 9 years by  SilverOne.
• This topic was modified 9 years by  SilverOne.