Wordpress No 404

[LukeHutchinson]

Hello,

My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly.

An example of this is:

sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type

sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404.

My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content.

I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same.

I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and  my theme is elogix from themeforest.

I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists.

If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.

[ThompsonPaul]

WordPress has this error-correction functionality built-in, Luke.

If you user a server header checking tool on that non-existent URL, you'll see that WP is automatically using a 301-redirect to push the user to the correct address each time - so no duplicate content or split authority problems at all.

Paul

[LukeHutchinson]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for clearing that up for me!. When I was playing with it I was extremely confused as normally 301 actually redirects and shows the new URL.

As a temporary solution I ended up stripping the category base meaning it now 404s or 301s to the correct page if you try any of the things I originally mentioned.

I actually did a fair bit of research on it prior to asking on SEOmoz and could not find anything at all about it. I even asked a couple of web developers I know who use Joomla and Drupal and they could not figure it out either.

You clearly do learn something new every day as I had no idea about this prior to your reply.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question and clearing it up for me, it's appreciated,

Luke

[ThompsonPaul]

Hmmm... you should be seeing the URL change in the browser's address bar after the redirect pushes to the corrected URL, Luke. I certainly do in my installs that I confirmed it with.

At any rate, if this answered your question fully, would be a good idea to mark the question as "Answered" to help other users. I'd also love a mark as "Good Answer if you found it valuable.

And yea, absolutely - something new to learn every day. That's what I love about this business I only remember seeing this correction functionality mentioned once in passing in some documentation, but I couldn't find it by search even though i knew what I was looking for. So no wonder you couldn't scrounge it up.

Paul

[LukeHutchinson]

Hi Paul,

Will do. I forgot to mention but I actually found the flaw with the 404 when I was looking at the SEOmoz crawler statistics. It said that my sub categories were duplicate content as the pages it was referring to were assigned to multiple categories.

An example roughly based on my structure that it detected as duplicate content is the posts existing in: /category/seo/no1 and  /category/seo/no2 so as a result it was duplicate content. I deleted the sub categories and assigned them all to just the SEO category and realised that the sub categories were still resolving so to troubleshoot this I decided to add a random prefix to the end e.g. /seo/asdnas and the address still resolved to the root category.

My theory was that if someone generated for example 100 urls and built links that google would see it as 100 duplicate pages due to the fact it was not 404ing or changing url when as you said 301ing.

I will close the thread and mark your question as good answer.

Cheers.