Conditional 404 response based on inclusion of /node/# in URL

Question

I've been requested by a client to completely block the URLs that contain a /node/## after the hostname to prevent these locations from being indexed by search engines. My issue is that I've already defined a Page Not Found node that gets shown with error 404s.

I've already implemented a modification in the robots.txt file to include

Disallow: /node/
Disallow: /?q=node/

to prevent the web-crawler bots. However, the URLs are still directly accessible. So in this case, the client wants two different 404 actions:

• www.clientname.com/testttt -> Drupal renders 404 page
• www.clientname.com/node/897 -> blocked completely without returning Drupal's 404 page.

Does any module allow for this kind of functionality?

Answer 1

What about using hook_init in a custom module?

function hook_init() {
    // check arg(2) is empty as otherwise will block node edit and delete pages
    if(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 0, 5) == '/node' && arg(2)=='') {
        die(); // to stop completely
        //return drupal_not_found(); // to return 404 page
        //return drupal_access_denied()(); // to return 403 page
    }
}

Saying that it would be quicker to block these pages in .htaccess...

Answer 2

I solved this with a .htaccess addition

RewriteRule ^node?$ - [F]
RewriteRule ^node/[0-9]+$ - [F]

These throw the 403 errors before Drupal catches them, which is what the client wanted.