Last week I wanted to check how our latest project, Traiteur Patrick Costers, was doing in Google. The first result was the portfolio page here at CryptoNet. So far so good? I would rather have my clients url at first place than our project page. But this was the beginning of a long quest. Not one url was found in Google.be (Dutch):

traiteur-patrick-costers-in-google

traiteur-patrick-costers-in-google

I did a quick research in Google Webmaster Tools and where I found that the website wasn’t accessible by the Google bot. I fired up the local version on my notebook, expanded the Symfony debug toolbar and indeed, the HTTP headers responded with a 404 Not Found. Appearantly  I was forgotten to change the error404 action in the settings.yml. So I changed it to:

.actions:
default_module:         default   # Default module and action to be called when
default_action:         index     # A routing rule doesn’t set it

error_404_module:       default   # To be called when a 404 error is raised
error_404_action:       error404  # Or when the requested URL doesn’t match any route

In the executeError404() action of the default module, I did a forward to the index page. The HTTP headers returns a lovely 200 status on the homepage and a 404 one on the non existing pages.

To speed up the Google process, I added a xml sitemap to my Webmaster Tools. What do you do to enhance the “let Google find my new project”-process?