tflight

I’ve also been getting something similar, also since back around 2.3. For example yesterday I went through my log files and pulled out every time a 404 error was issued back to a request. There were a few valid 404’s in there, but there were also quite a few requests for WP posts that ARE valid URLs, that the client was issued a 404 for.

It doesn’t happen very often, say five out of every 50,000 page views, but it DOES happen. I host about 25 other (non-WP) websites on the same server and I don’t see it happening on those sites, so it doesn’t appear to be a server config/Apache error.

How I noticed it was that WP had given my friend Googlebot a 404 for my homepage. Yikes! That isn’t good. Googlebot came back a few hours later and fetched the page fine.

RVoodoo – What plugins are you running?

figured it out from another plugin, unfortunately it pushes the advanced section way down if the form is tall. Oh well.

Fantastic, thanks!

I agree there is an issue here with named anchor tags. For example right now if I go to the WordPress blog itself:
https://www.ads-software.com/development/

And scroll down to the March 10, 2007 entry about SXSW, check out the “Read on for more ?” link at the bottom of that post. The link points to this URL:
https://www.ads-software.com/development/2007/03/wordpress-at-sxsw/#more-200

So far so good, it looks fine. Let’s look at the HTTP status code returned:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4
X-Pingback: https://www.ads-software.com/development/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:43:04 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: https://www.ads-software.com/development/2007/03/wordpress-at-sxsw/#more-200/
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Server: LiteSpeed
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:43:04 GMT
Connection: close

Okay, so it issues a 301 and gives the new location. That should be fine. Here is the new URL it says to look at:
https://www.ads-software.com/development/2007/03/wordpress-at-sxsw/#more-200/

Let’s check out the HTTP status code from that request:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4
X-Pingback: https://www.ads-software.com/development/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:43:38 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Server: LiteSpeed
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:43:38 GMT
Connection: close

That isn’t good, it is issuing a 404 for that request. While my browser seems be handling the 404 by then removing the named anchor, but I’m not sure getting a 404 back is a desirable option. I track broken links via my server logs and there are thousands of 404’s now from “/#more-” links generated by the_content().

No problem, don’t worry about it. I’m just thinking ahead to the possibility I might need it someday, but right now I don’t.

Thanks, Kafkaesqui! I am using query_posts just to call specific categories so that should work great.

For future reference, if I need to check for a specific page in the footer, is there a way to reset the properties of the wp_query object to know what page ID I’m using rather than just that it is indeed a page?

I suppose I could just create my own new variable in the page template and check for that in the footer as well, but that wouldn’t be as fun. ??

I had the same problem, and just like the last poster I still got the error after clearing the .htaccess file and allowing new rules to be created. The .htaccess file had an incorrect rule setup.

Wrong:
^category/(.+)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&paged=$2

Correct:
^category/(.+)/page/([0-9]{1,})/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&paged=$2

This was in WP 1.5.1 as well.