[Greg]

The Google webmaster tools are showing my forum pages as 404 (Not Found), but if I browse to the pages they seem fine in the browser.

So I went to http://web-sniffer.net/ and found that all of my forum pages are returning HTTP status code 404, but the correct page content (?!).

I tried a simple static page in the forum folder, and that works fine.

Any ideas as to what might be going on here?

[Greg]

Interesting… the BuddyPress forums (https://bbpress.org/forums/) have the same problem, but the bbPress.org forums are fine.

I know that the BP forums and our site both use deep integration, so I tried removing that. Result: No more 404.

So it appears that deep integration is part of this problem.

I have bbPress 1.0.2, WPMU 2.8.4a and BuddyPress 1.0.3.

[Greg]

Looks like WordPress is setting the 404 because it doesn’t recognize the bbPress page that is loading.

When the global WP object is constructed, the function WP->handle_404 calls “status_header( 404 )”.

As a workaround, I modified “handle_404” to lay off the 404 if “BB_PATH” is defined (i.e. when a bbPress page is loading). This seems to work ok.

Here’s the new “handle_404” at around line 445 in “wp-includes/classes.php”.

function handle_404() {

global $wp_query;



if ( !defined( 'BB_PATH' ) && (0 == count($wp_query->posts)) && !is_404() && !is_search() && ( $this->did_permalink || (!empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) && (false === strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '?'))) ) ) {



// Don't 404 for these queries if they matched an object.

if ( ( is_tag() || is_category() || is_author() ) && $wp_query->get_queried_object() ) {

if ( !is_404() )

status_header( 200 );

return;

}

$wp_query->set_404();

status_header( 404 );

nocache_headers();

} elseif ( !is_404() ) {

status_header( 200 );

}

}

[chrishajer]

Continued here:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/deep-integration-google-might-not-be-indexing-your-forum-pages