Why are perfectly legitimate pages on my website registering in Google Webmasters as 404?

Question

I have seen this question asked several times here, but never clearly answered.

I suspect it has something to do with my .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^moreinfo/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/moreinfo$1 [R=301]
    RewriteRule ^healthsolutions/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/healthsolutions$1 [R=301]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=301]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1/ [R=301]
</IfModule>

when I check the URL without a forward slash at the end, it registers as 404 (even though it renders fine in a browser), but when I write it without the forward slash at the end, it renders 200 OK, but if I try to take off the forward slash with the .htaccess file, the browser gives me a 310 error (too many redirects)

you can see the 404 and 310 with this url: http://www.kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials.html which redirects to http://www.kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials/ (which is a 404), so what is a solution and why might this be registering as a 404?

Any Help is appreciated! (I'm using WordPress, BTW)

Answer 1

The page in question (kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials/) is not returning a 404 header response. It returns a 200 response which is correct and what it should return for pages that contain content that you wish to be accessible to visitors.