404 not working?

[newstd100]

Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites.

If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS).

I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David

[newstd100]

I haven't created one - no.

[UnderRugSwept]

Have you made a custom 404 page? If so, yes.

[newstd100]

Agree - is this likely to sit in htaccess configuration?

[gmk1567]

I would suggest you to fix this issue soon. Otherwise Google may report soft 404 error at one fine day.

Also check your redirect rules. Redirecting error pages to home page should be avoided.

[newstd100]

Hi Martijn, I seem to have the same issue across a number of my PHP sites.

An industry friend that I link to brought the issue to my attention - he dropped me a line to highlight that alot of these random pages are shown to be linking to his site - rather than just the homepage. I haven't managed to catch up with him to ask where this linking data has come from yet.

Apologies if I haven't explained this very well, but this is high on my list of things I'd like to fix.

• Appreciate there are other things I need to do on this website.

Thanks, David

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi David,

It's not very cool that random urls are not responding with a 404 status code error. But for now I think you have other items to fix first. Because as long as you're not linking external or internal to these 'broken pages' also Google isn't able to find them. And so won't think the site has a lot of soft 404 errors. To be sure the best would be to take a look at the crawl errors within your Google Webmaster Tools account. If there are a lot of recent (soft) 404 pages/ errors found by Google I would move this more to the top of my todo list.

I would prefer myself to fix them later on, but like many things you probably have a lot of other todos you want to take care of first.

Hope this helps!

[newstd100]

Hi Marisa, try http://www.videogameprices.co.uk/index.php/randomulr/.

Many thanks.

[UnderRugSwept]

We'd need to know your domain name so we can replicate the error.