404 pages served as 200 file found

I just started to check out modx. I see that it has the usual setup for clean url’s...however the result of this is redirecting all 404’s to a page and is being served as 200-file found for non existant pages.

While this seems great and nice and such, it causes serious serach engine problems.
1) All wrong url’s are reported as 200 - file found, therefore search engines will keep adding all 404 pages/url’s to your site---no updates for old non existant pages/wrong url’s.

2) As all 404;s go to one page there is a serious danger of a duplicate content penalty as multiple (200/file found) url’s point to one page.
Documentation: what is a result code and why should I care?
http://gsitecrawler.com/articles/error-404-200.asp

Test yours
http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx

Hi bruce2005, welcome to MODx The ’404 page reporting as a 200 page’ bug is already a known issue and is being looked at.

Thanks,
Garry

As the main negatives to the current situation are related to search-engines, an alternate solution in the short-term is to add a meta tag to the 404 page telling robots not to bother. I can’t get MODx’s nifty-looking meta tag thing to actually save a meta tag/page association for some reason, so the best solution is to add it to a duplicate template for use on the 404 page only. (Or anything you don’t want search engines indexing).

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,2037.msg34663.html#msg34663"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">My solution in the existing 200/404 thread.

Oh, and welcome to MODx. You are advised to search and browse before posting because the search function on this forum is fairly poor.

The search should be much better now since the search method was changed to a custom index. But browsing certainly doesn’t hurt. Particularly in the documentation.