Forms not posting when using FURLs and setting 404 & 405 to /index.php

Hi everyone,

On my Windows server I have setup the page 404 & 405 pages to /index.php to enable Friendly URLS, however I have just noticed on the form pages the forms do not post back to the server, the only way I can seem to get this to work is to prefix the FURLS with index.p?q=

Does anyone know a way I can get this working on page names such as www.domainname.com/contact-us.html instead of www.domainname.com/index.php?q=contact-us.html

As I have read google ranks better with a URL which does not have a ? in them.

Thanks in advance

Which server are you running on windows? IIS, Apache, etc...
Is your configuration file set up to allow overrides by .htaccess files?
is you .htaccess file configured correctly for your server?
did you try XAMPP?

-sD-
scotty Delicious

This is common question.

On Apache, if site is handled via ErrorDocument (error 404), POST and GET data get deleted, Apache truncates them. GET data can be read back by a script that parses URL, but POST data are lost forever.

It is a feature, not bug, you can find this in Apache documentation.

Thanks for the replys,

I’m using IIS and have no settings which override .htaccess files, I was hoping that I would not need a 3rd party plugging such as IIS_Rewrite.

I think the errorDocument is also getting truncated on IIS.

Does anyone know if urls like this would index properly on google and work well within SEO guidlines:

www.domainname.com/index.php?q=contact-us.html

Thanks again

Yes, it would be OK.

There are many bad ideas about how things should be technically done acording to good SEO results, but they are bullshit many times.

SEO is more and more question on good whole web project (theme, information architecture, usability, content, PR), rather than some tricks and tips.

Search engines less and less care about how URLs are structured, it’s the exact case of the principle stated above. Why would Google care how you do your URLs?

Yep I understand SEO is a complicated matter .

Anotehr important matter I have just noticied is that our webstats show page views on index.php, we need to be able to see what URLs people are accessing i.e FURLS.

Has anyone managed to setup FURLS on a Windows IIS Installation so the urls are like index.php or index.html and the forms still post data?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks