Question

the problem is that for some reason googlebot gets a bunch of error 404s when crawling a certain page but everything works fine on my end, I think…

using htaccess, I have rewritten a page with vars for seo purposes, so:

RewriteRule   ^feeds/([^/]*)\.xml/?$   /rss/feeds.php?cat=$1 [QSA,NC,L]

so I get www.url.com/feeds/category.xml
instead of

www.url.com/feeds.php?cat=category

I’ve also ajusted all urls on the page to follow this rule and like I said everything works fine on my end… googlebot for some reason only sees www.url.com/feeds/category and does see the .xml extention.

not sure if it would work but I was hoping to put a rule in htaccess to redirect www.url.com/feeds/category to www.url.com/feeds/category.xml in the even that this happened, but was unsure of how to do so.

Answer 1

Maybe try

RewriteRule   ^feeds/([^/]+)/?$   /feeds/$1.xml [R,NC]

Which would redirect www.url.com/feeds/category to www.url.com/feeds/category.xml, using a HTTP 302 Redirect. Remove the R flag if you don’t want it do use the HTTP 302 Redirect, but that would make www.url.com/feeds/category a valid URL as far as google is concerned. Just in case: mod_rewrite.