Managing 404 error pages with noindex and url rewrite

Posted by ZenMaster on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by ZenMaster
Published on 2012-06-30T15:58:27Z Indexed on 2012/06/30 21:25 UTC
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Currently I use custom 404 error pages, having the following meta on them :

<meta content="noindex" name="robots">

My guess is this way Google will remove deleted pages faster from the index, anyone has experienced a case where it does ?

Also, is it better to have the url path rewritten to the actual error page, like the url pattern: http://{mysite}/{404_error_page} or is it best to keep the old deleted page's url when serving a 404 error ?

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