Still having 404 issues with Drupal
Hi,
I am using Drupal 5.2, Cleanurls, Pathauto and Global Redirect enabled.
Drupal is throwing correct 404 in most cases, BUT
Drupal doesnt throw 404 for all urls with the following pattern:
http://example.com/myContentType/doesnotexist
You can see this Issue live:
http://drupal.org/forum/doesnotexist
Maybe this could be exploited by someone and hurt your SE rankings.
Has anyone a workaround for this? Or don't you see this as an issue?
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Another live
Another live example:
http://groups.drupal.org/jobs/notexistingurl
no workaround - requires core patches
This will require some effort in the core modules to search for certain conditions and then instead of returning a page to return a drupal_not_found.
I think it makes sense for Drupal to return a 404 in those situations and would certainly support a patch that does that.
--
Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard
404
I think this happens with view URLs also. I thought it was a Views problem, but maybe the core or another module is causing it.
Most web applications suffer
Most web applications suffer from this bug, I don't mean that as an excuse and it would be great if drupal would be checking the url more precise. Actually it would be another of the plenty examples where drupal is ahead of the competition in terms of search engine optimisation.
An example that not even the big players handle this correctly.
http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Drupal-Development-John-VanDyk/dp/1590597559/r...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590597559/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=...
However I don't think that the bug could lead to serious problems except someone would place plenty of links to your site to invalid url but someone like that would probably find better ways to harm your rankings. Well if someone links to the wrong urls you simply redirect the requests to the correct url manually.
Maybe this is a task for globalredirect?
"look if the url looks exactly like one in the db and if not cut away the stuff at the end until it fits to a known url and redirect"
Btw, as no one mentioned it yet: "5.2 is an insecure version you are highly advised to update your site or the 404 problem will be the smallest you've got!" ;)
Thank you all for your
Thank you all for your answers.
After reading your answers, I think I can live with this 404 issue.
The benefit for me seems not to be worth the effort.
But I see problems for s.th. like an Drupal based classified ads application.
You get more and more content in the index, but after a specific timeframe, outdated content will be automatically deleted, so you get more and more duplicates.
After a specific threshold Google will raise a flag and - BAMM - you go down the road - I know what I am talking about ;-)
@protramper:
Thanks fo the hint, have to take care of this, or maybe i switch directly to DP 6.
I knew it would be a good Idea NOT to Post my Websites URL - you showed me why ;-)
An easy fix...
... Would be simply to check for an integer - or at least on the 'forum/[arg1]' paths... But then I suppose you just whack in a random number instead. Surely it's a pretty quick fix to check the term ID exists?!
I knew there was a neat blog
I knew there was a neat blog post somehow related to this issue - just couldn't find it until now ;)
http://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/blog/04-02-2008/drupal-and-seo