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I just did an SEO test of my site http://www.photographyattic.com using seositecheckup.com. It flagged up pages with 404 errors

From 100 distinct anchor links analyzed, 72 of them seems to be broken.

These pages don't seem to be broken when I view with my browser. Example http://www.photographyattic.com/category-1

Any idea why this would be?

unor
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Peter23
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  • I removed your second question, as this was asking for SEO advice, which would be off-topic on Stack Overflow. – unor Mar 06 '14 at 11:22
  • This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO and too localized – John Conde Mar 06 '14 at 12:50
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    Not really off topic now. It's a 404 error...found because I was doing an SEO test which I mentioned so viewers would now how I found the issue. – Peter23 Mar 06 '14 at 15:00
  • I'm still stuck anyone got any answers? I really think it's down to htaccess and just a simple rewrite but cant find the solution. – Peter23 Mar 07 '14 at 10:25

1 Answers1

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http://www.photographyattic.com/category-1 is sending HTTP status code 404. The page doesn’t have to be broken because of that, you can display whatever you like on 404 pages.

You should send the status code 200 instead.

unor
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  • Thanks for the reply. I don't understand though? How do I change this? – Peter23 Mar 06 '14 at 14:59
  • Thanks to unor, I looked up status code 200 and found some sites suggest that problems with 404 are down to wordpress...and suggest adding header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK') to the page below the lines require(dirname(__FILE__).'/wp-blog-header.php' ); I tried this but it didn't work, just thought that may give someone other ideas? – Peter23 Mar 06 '14 at 17:36
  • one other thought - the pages that are causing 404 errors are dynamic pages and the htaccess file rewrites them RewriteRule ^category-(.*) /category.php?catid=$1 if this rule wasnt there they would get 404 errors could there be an issue with that? – Peter23 Mar 06 '14 at 17:48
  • @Peter23: The 404 *could* be set in one of those places (PHP or .htaccess), yes. Does the RewriteRule end with something like `R=404`? When you try to solve it, do you know how you can test which status codes gets sent? Developer tools built into browsers usually offer this: just open the console and reload the page, then you’ll see which HTTP status codes get sent. – unor Mar 06 '14 at 20:39
  • I'm out of my depth sorry need ti explaining really simply. I have found adding a mod rewrite RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] in the root directory has removed the errors with the category-x pages...but I still have eight 4040s from pages such as manufacturers.php – Peter23 Mar 06 '14 at 21:00
  • adding the rewrite removed the erros becuase it sent all the category-x and product-x dynamic pages to index.php! So that wasn't the answer :( – Peter23 Mar 07 '14 at 10:26