Friendly 404 page for SMF Forums

One of the other issues I needed to sort out when I bought My Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners was to sort out the wierd 404 the site was serving.

As you will know a 404 is served when the page doesnt exist but for some reason when I took over the forum it was trying to send these requests through to a page called 404.shtml and looping it round and round… Not great really.

So to sort that I decided I would implement a more friendly 404 page. To do this I opened up the .htaccess file in the root of the domain (If you dont already have a .htaccess file there just create a file with that as the name – yes it does start with a . and no file extension!)

In that .htaccess file we add this line: -

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.----escape_autolink_uri:c6b9723d6f5eae4cea3e6878d207df83----.com/404-error-page.php


Obviously you would change that domain to your own (Dont send me your 404 errors!)

This then allows me to create a nicer more friendly page to show people that the file didnt exist rather than simply returning a 404 error to the browser.

This is what that page looks like: -

This looks a bit better I think.

One last thing, you still have to make sure that this friendly page issues a 404 header to the search bots or you will just be serving a lot of duplicate pages for no reason!

Heres how you do that with PHP: -

< ?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?>

This has to go at the top of the page before anything outputs to the browser.

Hope that helps!