Genuine 404s and Google Verification

Google is steadily building up it’s webmaster tools and winning over the hearts of webmasters. As covered in my Google Sitemaps and Verification post the feedback can be very, very useful.

I have run into problems though on Mambo and Joomla sites because they don’t throw true 404s so as far as GoogleBot knows every page is a good page. Google and Googlebot have given webmasters an incentive to change… access to the stats!

To get Mambo and Joomla to throw a 404 you need three things!

1. Create a page using the Static Content editor with a message for users
2. Create a menu item for
3. make the following hack to the index.php file. Go to line #54 and add in the $pagename variable and extend the if/then/else check for the $Itemid. The $Itemid for the 404 page is hardcoded and retrieved from step #2.

[php]// retrieve some expected url (or form) arguments
$option = trim( strtolower( mosGetParam( $_REQUEST, ‘option’ ) ) );
$Itemid = intval( mosGetParam( $_REQUEST, ‘Itemid’, null ) );
$pagename = mosGetParam($_SERVER,’REQUEST_URI’);

if ($option == ”) {
if ($Itemid) {
$query = “SELECT id, link”
. “\n FROM #__menu”
. “\n WHERE menutype = ‘mainmenu'”
. “\n AND id = ‘$Itemid'”
. “\n AND published = ‘1’”
;
$database->setQuery( $query );
} elseif (empty($pagename)||$pagename == ‘/’) {
$query = “SELECT id, link”
. “\n FROM #__menu”
. “\n WHERE menutype = ‘mainmenu'”
. “\n AND published = 1”
. “\n ORDER BY parent, ordering LIMIT 1”
;
$database->setQuery( $query );
}
else {
//header(‘Status: 404 Not Found’);
header(‘HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found’);
//hardcoded Item Id of the missing page
$query = “SELECT id, link”
. “\n FROM #__menu”
. “\n WHERE menutype = ‘mainmenu'”
. “\n AND id = ’41′”
. “\n AND published = ‘1’”
;
$database->setQuery( $query );
}[/php]

You can test it out over at Property Prophets

Next Steps

I should consider creating a component and getting the index page to search by component name which can be fixed in every instance.

The ideal would be for this to be a standard config option in Mambo and Joomla. After all when you view your logs you’ll see bots requesting haphazard urls testing the integrity of your site. Far better to tell them to go away by feeding them a 404 than have them hammer endlessly at your server.