Google’s Martin Splitt answered a question about how Googlebot responds to a pre-render meta tag that has the value of 404 page not found. It’s a good question because this is the kind of meta tag, a non-standard meta element, isn’t often encountered so it’s good to know what to do when something like this comes up.
The person asking the question wanted to know about how Google might respond to a meta tag in the head section that has the name “prerender-status-code” and a value of “404” which means that the requested page is not found.
The question was asked by a person named Martin and Martin Splitt of Google is the one who answered it.
This is the question :
“Martin is asking: What does Googlebot do when it finds <meta name=”prerender-status-code” content=”404″> ?”
Martin Splitt answered:
“Well Martin, that’s easy to say, Googlebot currently ignores that status code.
I guess this is coming from a single page application that is client-side rendered and you want to avoid soft-404s, in that case consider adding <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> or redirect to a page where the server responds with the 404 status code.
For more information on that see our documentation at developers.google.com/search.”