I am not VueJS programmer, but I work with in a company where we developing a VueJS website.

The website have articles. The URL is something like this:

http://example.com/here_is_news_from_sofia.htm

However if you type:

http://example.com/here_is_news_from_blabla.htm

You should go to 404 page.

I inspected several websites and stackoverflow questions, they explain how you should do catch-all router etc, so finally you get a page with "404 Not Found" text on it.

However, in ALL cases, the HTTP code send to the client is not 404, but 200.

With my team, I elaborated this:

When you go to any article, you get something like this:

<html>
    <body>
        <div id="app">
            <app />
        </div>
        <script src="/js/client.js"></script>
    </body>
</html>

Of course, if you click on a link, this page remains and everything is loaded via JS dynamically.

Then lets suppose article is not found.

VueJS will be able to show "404 Not Found" as text, but because HTTP headers are already send (HTML page is already loaded), it will not be able to send 404 code to the client.

For the same reason, VueJS can not send 301 code redirect to the client.

VueJS can incorrectly change the URL in the browser to "http://example.com/404.htm" - this is NOT a correct solution for search engines, since this is purely client-side (in-browser) "trick".

The other think it can do is to execute fancy redirect, as shown here Vue-router redirect on page not found (404) :

Vue.component("page-not-found", {
    template: "",
    created: function() {
        // Redirect outside the app using plain old javascript
        window.location.href = "/404.htm";
    }
}

This will make the browser to reload the /404.htm page from the server and if the server (Apache / Nginx) is configured correctly, it will send "correct" 404 code to the client.

However I don't think Google and MSN will recognize that http://example.com/here_is_news_from_blabla.htm is a 404 page.

Am I missing anything?

• Is there another way VueJS might handle this situation?
• How VueJS websites gets indexed from search engines like Google and MSN?
• Off topic bonus question - can VueJS generate visible HTML code that contains the article?