OK boys and girls; 404 ErrorDocuments and headers..

sfullman

here is the deal, I added this in .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

being a php page, I can make this page show whatever I want. This addiction started innocently enough; you know, make the page say "we can't find that page".

Then it started wanting more and more of me. A little voice inside said "when the user requests www.mysite.com/shoelaces, give them the same content as www.mysite.com/products.php?category=shoelaces".

Then it really started to consume my time. I had a CMS system where the user could use TinyMCE and write their own content. But how to write a link to a new page? The inner voice said "let them write any link like href="no-such-page-but-it-seems-good-to-me", and just read that as the page and let them then edit the new "page" using your CMS - and it worked.

But, am I addicted to ErrorDocument 404? Everything above was tongue-in-cheek but seriously, I'm wondering if all of these pages are 404, and google is receiving a 404, then will it ever spider the content? So my question is:

any way to do this where a header 404 is not sent?
any better way to do this overall

Thanks and I hope this thread helps others..

Samuel

sfullman

So, I can continue to do large doses of 404 pages..

According to php.net/header, you can send this header:

	header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");

however you can also send this one (I tested it using curl):

	header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");

which will say the page is OK, even when it's an error document.

So, what I recommend to those of you using php pages as ErrorDocuments is something like this:

if( /* the request is something that you understand and can/intend to fill */){
	header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
}else{
	//though this is probably redundant, I got this output anyway..
	header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");

}

Then, you can use a 404 php page with impunity.. 🙂

However, I'd like to know if there really is a better way to do this whole thing that I'm not aware of, such as the handling of "pretty URL's" etc. - thanks.

Samuel

bradgrafelman

You should look into mod_rewrite - it sounds more suited to what you're looking for (and at least more appropriate than using ErrorDocument).

sfullman

When taking over a website and sunsetting a lot of the old url's I will use modRewrite - and if you have a structure I think mod-rewrite is good also - but in a case where someone types in something that doesn't match your structure, OR where I give a user the ability to create a new page by CMS out of just an href link, then the ErrorDocument method seems a better choice - since I can't predict either party's structure.

But again, the ability to

header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK');

is important since I want google to realize that this is a "real" page.

Samuel

Weedpacket

Consider some of the other legitimate response codes. E.g., if what they entered was wrong but you were able to determine what was correct, a 301 response would be more appropriate.

If you're creating a new page in response to a new URL being requested, then the appropriate responses would be 201 or 202 depending on whether the new page is created immediately or not.