Hello Guys, sorry to drag up an old debate but I am currently in conflict with a fellow employ about something. Basically we have custom error pages which return 200 status codes when you hit them, I want to submit site maps (for our dynamic retail sites) for obvious reasons but am bothered about Google picking this up and penalising us for it. Do you think it's possible they will penalise us? technically it is against their guidelines but the point is we are not really doing it on purpose, just trying to make the site more useful for customers. Is there a solution to this or is it best to steer clear of sitemaps altogether?
I suggest you do not solve your problem that way. A 404 is better for crawlers, and you can still create good error pages.
What the point returning a 200 code for an error page ? Why is it more useful for your customers, you could as well return a 404 code, they will not notice
You guys misunderstand, we are not purposely doing this, its doing it anyway. I am no whiz at aspx (our pages are all in it and done by programmers) so I don't know the problem. I was worried it may constitute a penalty from Google that's why I haven't submitted the sitemap, thanks for confirming this so far guys.