404 on Windows/IIS with ISAPI_Rewrite simply won’t work

  • I’m at a loss here. My WordPress blog runs fine on my Windows/IIS server with the standard set of ISAPI_Rewrite rules (Articulate Blog).

    The big problem I have now, though, is that my 404 page in my blog simply doesn’t work, even though 404.php exists in my custom theme (under \wp-content\themes\<theme name>). As you can see from the below, it simply returns a page that looks like no search results were found:

    https://www.articulate.com/blog/nothinghere

    The difference, though, is that it’s really NOT the “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” page. Compare the above with this:

    https://www.articulate.com/blog/?s=theeee&x=0&y=0

    This is really important for me to get fixed both because it would be great to have a 404 display when it should (as the rest of my site does), but also because I have a Google Mini, and it’s indexing non-existent pages under my /blog directory since WordPress is not properly returning the 404 page, and thus, a header status code of 404.

    So if I can get the actual 404 page to return properly, adding the PHP code to return the proper status code is easy enough:

    <?php header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found"); ?>

    I’ve also posted a comment on a related blog post here.

    I’m running Windows Server 2003.

    Do I need to add a new rewrite rule to account for 404s?? Make some change in WordPress? I’m leaning toward this being a WP issue since Helicon Tech says the 404 is not specified in ISAPI_Rewrite rules and I have 404 error handling for non-WordPress content specified correctly in IIS, so that leaves WP.

    Any suggestions??

    Thanks in advance!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter articulategabe

    (@articulategabe)

    Plugin that solves this issue:

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/permalink-validator/

    I’ve been using it for several weeks now with great success.

    FYI.

    This plug-in does not work with WordPress 2.2. If used with firefox, an error message appears stating that the request can’t ever be finished.

    It would be a great benefit if someone could come up with a definitive doc on how to get the SEO friendly permalinks working.

    Hi dolemite

    I have updated the plugin to version 0.2, so it now can handle a static frontpage.

    If the updated version doesn’t solve your problem, then post your permalink-structure, and I will try to re-produce your problem

    -Rolf

    I tried Permalink Validator v0.3 on WordPress 2.2 with IIS Mod-Rewrite pro and Clean Permalinks and everything worked perfect!

    Thread Starter articulategabe

    (@articulategabe)

    The same version of the plugin I’m using on WP 2.1 (Permalink Validator 0.1) also works fine for me on WP 2.2.

    sugarrae

    (@sugarrae)

    The problem is that permalink validator serves a shiny page that SAYS it is a 404, but when testing the server header, it is actually showing a 200 OK code to the engines. It can say 404 to the user all it wants, but unless it serves a 404 code to the engines as well, it doesn’t work 100% – anyone know how to fix? Version 2.2.2

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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