BANS Duplicate Content & No 404 Pages
June 27, 2008 By: Justin | 9 commentsSo I just switched a domain over to BANS and noticed that dead URL’s return a 200 status code instead of a 404. It is hardcoded into BANS to return the main index page content with a status code of 200 if a page is not found. Well, this is a problem in terms of SEO.
The 200 status code tells Google the page exist and can be indexed. (and it will index it) If there are links pointing to a page on your site that should be 404, it will get indexed as a duplicate of the main page.
Standard methods of dealing with 404’s don’t work. A .htaccess entry won’t do the trick. You could manually disallow these pages in robot.txt, but that could be a horrible task if you have many pages. The site I switched over had 100 indexed pages before the switch. I now have about 80 duplicate pages indexed by Google with nothing but item listings and no content. All with same title. This is a big duplicate content problem.
A Solution
I found a cool hack from sonjay on the BANS forum, but it didn’t 100% solve my problem. I didn’t really like the solution 100%, and I’m not 100% happy with my solution either. But I played around and I’m getting the effect I want.
Go Into Your Index.php
I inserted this at line 563, right after
// End –>
</script>’;
and right before
if ($front->q != ” && $front->mainCat != ‘
INSERT THIS
Wordpress messes up the code, so here it is in a txt file
Why the 301?
Well, I could have gone with the 404 and had the pages deindexed, but I had links pointing to some of those old pages. I wanted to keep the link juice, so I went with the 301 redirect to send all incoming traffic to the homepage.
I Make No Promises
I got that code off a forum. I make no promises and assume no responsibility for its use. I got it to work fine on my BANS, but I can’t be responsible for it messing up any of your sites. I just thought it was worth sharing.
Tagged With 301 redirect, BANS, Build A Niche Store, PHP
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Hi any one can help me,please check why my site was not indexed in google.
Well, it not really showing links in Yahoo. I would work on link building. Plus, the dashes (-) in the domain name make it look a little spammy.
I was have a problem with this on one of my sites. Thanks so much for the little hack.
np Scott
Thanks a lot but I got error like below:
–
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxx/public_html/themes/layout-1-both/header.php:7) in /home/xxx/public_html/index.php on line 565
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxx/public_html/themes/layout-1-both/header.php:7) in /home/xxx/public_html/index.php on line 566
—
What happend?
Seems like an error in your theme?
I input in the first line of header.php and problem solved.
Oh, wordpress deleted it. I input ob_start at the first line of header.php