Well well well…where do I start?
I guess the first thing I can say is- NEVER WRITE YOUR OWN HTACCESS CODE AND RUN 2 SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY PLUGINS AT THE SAME TIME. Only bad things can happen. Don’t worry though folks, this tale get’s better as it goes along. I will tell you step by step how my day went yesterday….
Here is how the story begins, I log into Google Webmaster tools to check an account I work on (alcohol rehabilitation center). What do I see? The worst possible thing any SEO could ever see…404′s across the board…Now, let me put this into perspective…this client ranks Top 3 for a bunch of NATIONALLY COMPETITIVE terms. What was even more strange was that all the pages rendered perfectly to the human eye….you click a link, it goes to the correct page and everything looks fine. So, after I bug out and check every possible crawler emulator to verify, I realize that when the client moved their old site (http://www.thelastresortpa.com) to the new site, they did something terrible;
- They wrote their own messy htaccess code
- Were running two SEF plug ins at once
OK OK OK ….Don’t panic…this is how I fixed it.
1. Got the plug in for Firefox Live HTTP Headers this way I could see what was actually happening
2. Turned off all SEF plugins…everything worked at that point as far as 404 with page still rendering…now I was getting the pretty HTTP 200′s 
BUT- The URL’s looked like Santas ass after christmas…
3. Next- Deleted my htaccess and replaced it with the htaccess.txt (rename it to .htaccess when its on your server, of course) that comes with a fresh install of Joomla.
4. Went back into Joomla admin panel>extensions>plugin manager> and turned on ONLY SH404SEF plugin
5. Watched Live HTTP headers and every crawler emulator I could find give me back the best 3 numbers you will ever see….200 all around
6. Last but not least, canonicalized their homepage which is http://www.rehabilitation-center.org
OI VEY!
So, I hope that helps anyone whoever runs into that problem. The page renders perfectly to the human eye but the crawlers are getting HTTP 404 errors.
Thanks everyone!
