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RapidWeaver Classic
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Hi there,
i’ve listened to your podcast. It is interesting. I like the shorter shows more then the long ones.
I have some comments on episode 26. You are telling to add a custom 404 page to a website. This is a good idea. But the way you suggest to add it is not completely correct. You tell to add it in the project and use any plugin you like to create the 404 page. But if you do it like that, the http header will sent the code 200: page found.
That’s a bad thing. Because a 404 error is used by search engines to delete pages from their index. That way, their index becomes more accurate, more up to date and they are able to give better ‘answers’ the next time for the same request.

So, in addition to what you’ve said in the podcast, you should tell your page to sent the correct http header. That is done easily in Rapidweaver too:

  1. name the page 404
  2. choose .php as the file type
  3. go to the third tab on the page inspector
  4. Choose : ‘Prefix’
  5. add the following code:
<?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?>
  1. publish

The step of calling the error-document in the .htaccess will stay the same.

So, just saying that a page is a 404 page, doesn’t mean it is a 404 page. Or, how Google likes to phrase it:

It’s like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says “dog.” Just because it says it’s a dog, doesn’t mean it’s actually a dog.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en

Which http header codes your pages are returning is easily checked with a lot of on-line tools. Here is one of them:

http://404checker.com/full-header-checker

I think you can use this info yourself for developing your new RealMac software site. Good luck.

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