batface - 6:12 am on Jul 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I have seen a strange series of events on a Joomla site and wonder if anyone else has seen this or knows of a solution.

Looking at a sites stats it is throwing up a awful lot of 404s. There were issues and the majority of issues were fixed using 301 rewrites, but the stats are still high.

Then I noticed something strange while playing around with a Xenu report. I click on a random link (it is a valid URL) and it returns a 404. It doesn't matter where the link comes from, put it in the browser address bar and get a 404. Refresh the page again and again over a period of time still a 404.

In another browser tab go to the website main URL and then drill down through the directory structure and find the page in question. It is there and valid, no error.

Both URLs are identical.

If I now go back into the browser tab with the 404 page and refresh I now get the correct page displayed!

Any ideas what could be happening here? I was wondering if it was some kind of strange indexing issue in the MySQL database?

thanks,
Mick