So, W3 Validator is being really weird.

This page http://www.nerld.com/about/ evidently exists.

However, if I type it into the validator, it returns 404 not found. This happens with most pages on my site, but not the home page. Very strange and I don't know why!

Please advise.

Thanks so much.

It's not the validator, it's probably something with your server settings. I'm really not very good with server configurations so I can't help much. But there are some files (index.php and nerld_footer.jpg) that returns a 404 status. I can see the file contents, but for some reason it still has a 404 status message attached.

Check server config file and/or .htaccess to see what's playing silly buggers. And whoever altered it, slap them and don't let them do it again.

Okay, I've updated the website that no 404 errors return when the page loads, but the validator still says that the page doesn't exist!

PaulW, here's my .htaccess:

Options -Indexes

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nerld.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.nerld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|css)$">
FileETag None
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

I don't see anything wrong, do you? Also, where should I find my server config file?

Default ,oaction is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

What do server error logs say?

There's nothing there... in fact, there's no 'conf' folder at all. All there is is an ftpquota file.

Your server is sending the 404 in the header.
You can see the header with an online tool to check the headers, like:
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/...-headers-tool/

Here is the response:

Server Response: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:21:22 GMT Server: Apache X-Pingback: http://www.nerld.com/blog/xmlrpc.php Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0 Pragma: no-cache Last-Modified: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:21:22 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I had this problem with a clients site on a GoDaddy server once. Never got it resolved with GoDaddy, their support just kept saying "we can view the page, must be a problem with the way the third party is requesting the page" - Yeah...

Ah. that's not cool! Well, I'll have to resolve this with my host soon. Time to test their customer service while I've still got the chance to back out!

it might be the case that your url rewriting is not configured properly.