Joomla! Discussion Forums

Happy Thanksgiving! to anyone in the US, and well, Happy Thursday! to everyone who is somewhere else. 

I have what I'm sure is a simple problem, but geez, I can't seem to sort this out, and I've looked for an hour now. 

Whenever I should be getting an error 404 on my site, it just goes to the homepage instead of returning the proper error page.  And I want it to give the error page, so that I can get verified on webmaster tools.

How do I fix this? 

Thanks so much for any help....this is making me crazy.

The problem here is that every page you see on a Joomla site is essentially the same page.  All requests are sent to index.php and the appropriate content is displayed depending on what parameters are passed to it.

If you have set up SEF URLs the mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess file will be sending every request to index.php even if the URI is page-that-does-not-exist.php.  So as far as the server is concerned it is a valid request so it returns a 200 OK header, rather than the 404 header you want in this case.

There have been lots of posts about this but I don't know if anyone has offered up a solution yet.

Thanks for the information Net Explorers.  I have seen several posts on this topic as well, and have been frustrated by the difficulty in finding a solution.  But I know that some/many joomla users must have sorted it out, as I hear about them using Google's webmasters tools.  Which means that they have been verified at some point.

The meta tag verification seems more difficult to me, as I use a template, and can't quite figure where to put the tags where they want them.  If anyone has ideas or suggestions on how to verify a joomla site made with a template, I would be very grateful.

Cheers.