page returns a 200 need 404

[humanode]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm having an issue trapping a series of malformed URLS that made it into Goog and Y! for some reason urls that look like this http://***.com/catalog/?prdid=123456 are in the index, and to make matters worse they are returning a 200 header code (and do not exist on my server), that is definitely not a good thing, if I'm to ever get rid of them they need to return a 404 or 410.

 

But I don't know how best to approach the issue. I was thinking I could just use robot.txt and ban the bots but I installed my store in the /catalog/ subdirectory so it would be pretty stupid to ban my store from the bots. Then I thought about using .htaccess but I'm not comfortable enough with working with them yet and I'm afraid I'll do more harm than good. .htaccess IMHO is an art and I'm not there yet.

 

If any of you would be so kind as to point me in the right direction, or offer a solution (wink, wink) :) I would really appreciate it.

 

Thanks everyone

[boxtel]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm having an issue trapping a series of malformed URLS that made it into Goog and Y! for some reason urls that look like this http://***.com/catalog/?prdid=123456 are in the index, and to make matters worse they are returning a 200 header code (and do not exist on my server), that is definitely not a good thing, if I'm to ever get rid of them they need to return a 404 or 410.

 

But I don't know how best to approach the issue. I was thinking I could just use robot.txt and ban the bots but I installed my store in the /catalog/ subdirectory so it would be pretty stupid to ban my store from the bots. Then I thought about using .htaccess but I'm not comfortable enough with working with them yet and I'm afraid I'll do more harm than good. .htaccess IMHO is an art and I'm not there yet.

 

If any of you would be so kind as to point me in the right direction, or offer a solution (wink, wink) :) I would really appreciate it.

 

Thanks everyone

 

just make sure you send a 404 header when displaying the product not found page.

The users will see the normal page but the SE's will get the 404 header.

 

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");