googlebot gets a 404 but the URI is valid

with multiviews

[lethal0r]

im using multiviews to give my site extensionless URIs.

the pages work fine for me, but googlebot reports a 404.

why is this?

[jdMorgan]

Have you used a server headers checker to examine the server response codes in detail?

If not, I'd suggest the "Live HTTP Headers" add-on for Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers.

You may also want to search for on-line user-agent spoofing tools or use the User-agent switcher add-on (again for Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers) to request URLs as a Googlebot and see exactly what Googlebot sees.

If your server responses look good using these tools, then you can be fairly sure that the problem was simply a Google-glitch.

Jim

[lethal0r]

thanks for that. it gives me a 404 too but still shows me the page! any ideas?

[lethal0r]

tut! I have some wordpress includes on a custom page and for some reason they return a 404 now that I am rewriting the url.

so I have just decided to add header("HTTP/1.x 200 OK") after the includes.

am also using the more efficient
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.php [nc]
instead of multiviews

Live HTTP Headers is really useful!

[jdMorgan]

I cannot recommend putting a band-aid on a major wound... You should find and fix the real cause of this 404 problem to prevent major trouble in the future.

Includes on your WP pages should probably refer to local files, rather that generating additional HTTP requests. That is, include a local file, not a URL.

Also, your RewriteRule requires a trailing slash on the requested URL. Is that what you want? If not, then

RewriteCond $1 !.\.php$
RewriteRule ^(.+)/?$ /$1.php [L]

might be better.

Jim