Hi,
i'm facing a problem with DNN/ASP response to invalid URLs:
1) HTML pages not found, will be handled by the IIS and return a 404 error
2) .aspx pages (exception is the DNN default.aspx), will return a 302 error (Moved temporarily) and then redirect the user to the valid DNN error page.
3) invalid URLs ending with "/default.aspx" will will also return a 302 error and then redirected the user to the valid home page

In the last scenario, the user may be confused, cause it is not transparent to him what happend.
Moreover, In case of the last two responses, search engines continue to look up the pages and
a) index the error page (error type 2)
b) Google's crawler responds with a "soft 404 error" (error type 3) (visible in Google Webmaster tools: crawling errors)

So: Is there any way to respond with a straight 404 error and a custom error page?
your's
felix

 Hi Sebastian/Felix

I've just released the latest version of the Url Master module, which for the first time has 'proper' built-in 404 Error Handling.

This means that, for a 404 error, it will:
- show a page you designate in the settings - this can be any page in your DNN site or a custom page you already have.  Note that if you have multiple portals you can specify a custom 404 page for each portal
- send back a 404 response code back to the requesting client.    If this is a search engine, then it will be a 'hard' 404, and you won't fall into problems with the Google 'soft 404' errors
- optionally keep a log of the 404 errors so you can see if there is common pages being requested.

I've covered this in more depth in my blog post Real 404 Error Handling in DotNetNuke

To my understanding there is no other way currently available to handle 404 errors in an integrated way like this with DotNetNuke.  Most 404 handling involves using the asp.net error handling, which does a 302 redirect to a normal page, giving you a 302/200 response code, which ends up in indexed incorrect pages, and Google starts guessing at which pages are the 404 error pages, usually incorrectly.

Check it out : this link goes to an invalid page : http://url-master.com/deadpage.aspx

You will see the 404 error page, and if you run a Http trace you'll see that it returns a 404 error status.

You can get the latest version of the Url Master module here : http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Url_Master_DNN_SEO_Urls

Jeff - essentially that is what the new version is doing - handling the 404 error within the code (rather than externally via a web.config setting).
The problem with using native IIS rewriting is that is has no idea what is/isn't a valid DNN page url - so you can't catch 404 errors externally to the DotNetNuke framework, because only DNN knows if /valid-page.aspx is OK and /invalid-page.aspx is not.  The other big step forward is being able to show a Dnn page for the 404 error page and still emit the 404 status code.    Because another part of the problem with an external (to dnn) solution is that it's difficult to implement a portal-specific 404 handler, because asp.net is designed around one application=one website, whereas DNN is one application=multiple sites.

But thanks for the support!