Don't loose Traffic and SEO because of Bad Links

February 23, 2012

Are 404 Errors Costing You Traffic, Hurting SEO and Indexing?:

Are you loosing potential SEO Building spider traffic, or potential customers coming from referral sites when links are broken? What does your 404 page look like? Do you even know when Links break?

A 404 page is a catch all error page that is served back to a spider or user when the page can not be found. This can happen for a number of reasons, some examples.

The page has moved
The page has been deleted
The URL was mistyped

In any event most web servers simply give a generic page not found error. If you are coming in from another site, you probably have no idea where to go from here. If you are a spider, you bounce to your next destination. In either case you the business owner have lost out on an opportunity

What Should I Have On My 404 Error Page?:

Ok, again this depends on your host. If they simply only allow a redirect, point it to your Home Page(Good) or your Quick Links Page (Better). This will help spiders to continue indexing and users to maybe find what they were coming in for in the first place.

If you can point to a custom 404 page you should provide a link to your Home Page and/or your quick links page. Also you can go to a great site call Link Patch and sign up for a free account and drop some code into the web page so you can be alerted when a 404 page is generated. You can then figure out why and correct the situation before it happens again.

If you are able to make a custom 404 Page Include the following:

A plain message that states the user has reached a page that does not exist
A link to your Site Map
A link to your Home page

You can also add a mail to link to report the page, but that is a burden you probably shouldn’t put on your user and if you have signed up with www.linkpatch.com you will be notified anyway. Another frequently used feature to keep spiders and human browsers is to also provide frequently accessed links for your hot pages. A great example of well implemented 404 page can be found here

Also, please don’t go crazy or overboard with your error page. Keep the look and feel the same. Use the same fonts, logos, color schemes etc from your main site to avoid further confusion.

How Do I See My 404 Error Page?:

This is pretty easy to do.

1) Open your browser of choice

2) Type your web address. i.e. www.ucanseo.com and enter. Everything should be fine

3) Now add to the end of is some random page name for instance “testerror.html” so you wind up with something like www.ucanseo.com/testerror.html

4) Your web server, providing you don’t really have a page named that, should return a 404 error.

How Do I Change My 404 Error Page?:

This varies widely by Hosting provider, hosting operating system, content management (CMS) and more. Sometimes it something you can control simply through a hosting control panel change, other times you may need to contact your hosting provider or web developer to ask about custom error pages.

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