nofollow functionality for error404.php

Question

My header.php contains header information for all my pages, but for the error404.php page needs the nofollow meta data meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow.

I tried this in header.php

<?php if($page_id = 'error404') { echo "<meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow'>"; } return false; ?>

/*error404.php*/
define("PAGE", "Error404"); $page_id ='error404';

But I can't seem to get it to work. This code currently kills all the css on the index.php file.

I'm using .htaccess for handing error 404s.

.htaccess
# Send user to error404.php

ErrorDocument 404 /error404.php

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Just call

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

before any output (echo, print, ...). You can still have custom error page, but there will be no indexing.