Hey, I created a custom 404.php page and have the following code in the .htaccess to direct any non-existent pages to the custom 4040 page,
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.website.com/404.php
So it works great but when I search the website on google, 404.php is listed under the sitelinks. So I searched Google and came across their advice for what to do with a custom 404 page showing up in search and how to make it not show up.
"No matter how beautiful and useful your custom 404 page, you probably don't want it to appear in Google search results. In order to prevent 404 pages from being indexed by Google and other search engines, make sure that your webserver returns an actual 404 HTTP status code when a missing page is requested."
So then I searched Google for "actual 404 https status code" where there is lots of information about how it should work, but couldn't find any information about how to implement it. I have the 404.php page demoted under the sitelinks section of Google Webmaster Tools and there is a 0 soft 404 error under crawl errors. But do I need to put a line of code in the .htaccess file to show that an actual 404 error is there when on 404.php page.
Also, under Blocked URLs in webmaster tools there is this code,