I have some old URLs floating around out there When someone accesses my site from these, instead of getting a 404 , the site is redirecting to the homepage is there something i can add to my .htaccess to point these URLS to a 404 page
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/custom-error.html gives you precise details including a .htaccess solution
OK that was informative but the problem I am having is that the correct Error is not coming up for links that are not there so I can't even redirect them
I am NOT sure to fully understand your last point the error messages from apache site are for pages that do NOT exist hence any misspelling or any request of old/deleted/never existed pages or pages requested in wrong path will result in such default error page redirects as explained in detail in apache docs hence whether a page EVER existed or not is of no importance for the proper working of such error messages teh best is you try take ANY of previous URLs that you want to redirect to a default 404 page and test it - make sure to CLEAR your browser cache each time you test !!! if your current situation redirects to your domain index - then may be an already existing error configuration does that whatever is in a SUB folder-htaccess overrides system wide or previous higher level htaccess hence check if any error directive is already existing in ANY sub-folder ...