I'm fixing some minor things on the 404 page for all my websites.My punctiliousness makes me unable to sleep well unless I get an answer to this question. :)Does a 404 page need a meta description tag?If yes filled with what, page not found?I would  say no, if Google really cares more about contents and user frienly site rather than about what is on the page (moreover the 404 page snippet should never show up in Google cause server is sending real 404 code).But after reading all this stuff:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93641http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-your-404-pages-more-useful.htmlhttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136085on how they suggest to fill up a 404 page (that I always thought should just be a simple 404 page) I started to feel worried about meta description too.I'm just looking for some clue/suggestion I might not have thought about, or maybe just reassurance. :)Thanks
404 page needs meta description (just to make Google happier)?
seo;google;404;meta description
The most important thing for your 404 pages is the header's status code: it must be 404 not found.It's maybe stupid to say that, but in dynamics applications, with an URI like this http://my.webapp.invalid/index.php?id=4, when id=4 return nothing, many web developers returns a 404 message with a 200 OK status code...An other thing: for example, if someone try http://my.webapp.invalid/index.php?id=toto whereas id only accept integer, it's not a 404, but a 400 Bad Request that you must return.It's easy to handle this, for example, with the header function in PHP or the HttpWebResponse.StatusCode Property in .Net