I’m not sure this is the right thread for this as I’m not interested in arguing why or why not EE is SEO friendly.. tools are tools and if you hold your chainsaw the right way up results will improve by 1000%

.. I’m much more interested in finding out how my Wordpress sites get the mod_rewrite thing right with these lines of .htaccess code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

but EE’s implementation of nearly the same method causes the site to always return a 200 server header.

With the above code (and no doubt some other jiggery pokery elsewhere) non-existent Wordpress url’s return a 404 as they should, and therefore your site has no duplicate content issues.

Why can’t we do this with EE? I’m no Apache config expert (far from it), but it seems the method above is very similar to the 3rd approach (“File and Directory Check” Method) for removing index.php detailed in the Wiki here.

This is by far the simpler method as it does not require you to edit your .htaccess file to specify new folders to be included or excluded from your mod_rewrite rules. There is no way my client is going to be able to do that, or even know to ask me to do that.

Anybody have a more in-depth knowledge of how to generate 404’s when appropriate and use the “File and Directory Check” Method mentioned in the Wiki?

I use the file and directory check and I get 404 response headers.  I always assumed the information in the wiki about this was outdated.

Do you have an example of a site that gives 200 response on a 404 page?

Thanks for the response, in answer to your question, yes (still very much in development), this is my future home page, which is sitting on a folder one above root at the moment.

Try any url other than this and you’ll get back to the home page with a 200 header, like this for example.

Here’s what I have in my /ee/ folder’s .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /ee/
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

Please let me know if you have something different in your .htaccess that is working for you, or if there’s somewhere in the control panel where I need to tell EE to go to a 404 template..?

By the way I’m on Apache with EE 1.6.4

By the way, I’ve also checked a few high profile EE sites, like Jason Santa Maria’s redesign - looks like same deal there with the 200 headers - just try appending any nonsense to his domain name.

Veerle seems to get it right.. but I’m not sure what index.php removal method she is using.. I suspect its not the one we’re discussing. Would be really great if Ms Pieters could confirm..?

Ah!

Go to templates > global template preferences, you can specify the 404 page to be displayed there.

However, I’m pretty sure this only will display a 404 for missing template groups, and not templates within that group due to the way EE handles URL segments. 

You can can elminate this problem to a certain extent by looking at this wiki guide (I don’t quite understand the last part of the guide though).  But personally I think it’s more hassel that it’s worth.

Thank you thank you thank you.
You are right on all counts.. apart from the “more hassle than its worth” bit.. I’m still assessing the hassle factor.

I have looked through the info here and I see there is a debate going on but I am not seeing any real answers here.

I have a live site running now and it is indexed very well with Google so I don’t want to break things when I convert over to EE.

My pages are set up like this: www.domain.com/name-of-page/

I have to keep things this way so I must remove the index.php out of the URL and remove the group name then if I am understanding things correctly a “template” is actually a page as well as a template so I will need to name my templates like “page-name”.

I don’t want to have the 404 page not working correctly either.

What is the best way to do this?

Here’s what I’ve done that’s working for me:

• Create a 404 template and set it as the 404 page in the Control panel under templates > global template preferences.

• I have set up my .htaccess file to remove index.php using the “File and Directory Check” Method detailed here: http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs/ as this method requires no .htaccess maintenance as you add or remove folders to the site structure

• In my EE templates I am using a conditional to check whether the requested page has a corresponding entry in the database, this is detailed here: http://expressionengine.com/wiki/SEO_Friendly_404_pages/

I set the .htaccess up using the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

It did nothing…

I have posted in tech support also, I’m not sure what I am missing here…

Thanks for your help.

Is your .htaccess file being recognised by the server at all? Are the permissions set to 644? Try adding a random rule like a redirect or something to see if it gets executed. Where is EE set up? Is it in your public html root with your .htaccess also in root, or somewhere else?

PXLated - 24 September 2006 07:37 AM

Serps?
EE composes standard html pages and serves them. To the outside world (browsers, SEs) they are standard pages. There shouldn’t be any reason a search engine doesn’t index them.
If you search the forums, there have been several discussions on this.

Ditto.

I manage some EE sites that get 5,000 referrals a day from SEs. So far as the SE is concerned each page is just a page. ‘index.php’ in the URL string doesn’t matter. However, the /template_group/template/page_name_here in the string, when named appropriately, can be highly valuable in matching the density of the URL to the page and various keywords.

It’d be interesting to know what EE sites get back from search engine referrals. I have a number of sites that get 80% to 95% referrals from Google alone.