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HTTP Header Response code

Hi all: I’m new here and, what else, am looking for help. One of my clients has an SEO company who sent me the following and I can’t figure out how to change it: “The http header response code should 404, but currently is showing 200”. I would greatly appreciate any help on how to change the header response code. Thanks a lot and looking forward to helping out wherever I can.

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@rtretheweyMar 16.2012 — That message means when a user requests a document that doesn't exist on the site, your server responds with a code that says everything is OK (200), when it should say "Page Not Found" (404). This is often referred to as a "soft 404". When a search engine receives such a "soft 404", it considers the error message document to be the contents of the URL it was trying to crawl. Google watches for these "soft 404s" and will warn you about them in the Webmaster Tools console. But the point is, you're giving the search engines inaccurate information about your site. This is generally a minor problem, but it's worth resolving. If your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIs-based server, I'd suggest contacting your hosting service for technical support. If you have an Apache server, you'll want to check your .htaccess document for improper redirects or other issues or, again, contact your hosting company for help. Good luck!
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