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The Importance of Optimizing Your 404 Pages
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About the Author
Joe Whyte (35 Posts)
Joe Whyte has been developing, managing and implementing successful, innovative, bleeding edge digital marketing strategies for Fortune 500 companies for over 7 years.
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Great post Joe. This is definitely an important step. I hired a SEO company to optimize a clients pages. They did not do the 404 page, a link was broken and the entire site did not get crawled or ranked for 2 months. I noticed it and had to bring it to their attention.
Great post! That reminds me, we need to improve our own 404 pages on this site
Joe,
Good point. Let’s also not forget to make sure the “404 page” actually returns a 404 in the server headers. I have found several websites that do not.
I normally just put every single url I have on my 404 page so it acts as a second sitemap version
This reminds me, be sure to check your stats/analytics for any page requests that produce a 404 error. If you site’s been around for a while, it could mean either a dead link, or content has been moved. It’s a good idea to create a 301 Permanent Redirect so visitors end up on the right page, and search engines update the location of the page in their database.
This calls for a post on 301 redirects.
In fact, for those of you who are subscribed to the Search Marketing Standard Magazine, there is an excellent article called “5 Strategies to Preserve Your Website’s Link Equity” in the Spring 2007 issue. The article was written by Jaimie Sirovich, a well-respected authority on search engine friendly site architecture.
We’ll be sure to republish parts of the article on this blog in the near future.
Great point scott!! Everyone made some great comments about their 404 page experience.
Mike = You make a good point. Something I have seen is that when a 404 page returns a 200 error in the header your page becomes more vulnerable to attacks.
I think a post on 301 redirects is right up my alley. I just encountered a client today that severely needed one regarding canonical issues and the link worth was distributed among 2 incidences of their site which was hurting them in the SERPS.
I have only recently heard of optimizing the 404 page. Is this something that is really worth while? Also, how much will it add in the overall optimization of a site? And it looks like your saying that the 404 page can can act like any other page on the site.
Please forgive me if this is incorrect, as I am new to the SEO Field and am just now becoming familiar with this fine art.
Tracy,
It should not take you very long to optimize your 404 pages and, yes, it is worthwhile.
There are two reasons to optimize your 404 pages: visitors and spiders. Visitor can often misspell the URL or click on the dead link and end up getting a 404 page. If you don’t show him/her a way out, they will leave your site.
Spiders follow links so if they get a 404 page, one of your links is dead. Again, you want the spider to keep crawling and index more of your pages so that’s where optimized 404 page comes in handy.
Of course, there is no reason for you to have dead links. If you have moved one of your pages, set up a 301 redirect (something we will talk about here as well).
Now, how do you know where the spider got the 404 error? You go to Google Webmaster Central and check. It’ll tell you everything there.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Our 404 page brings us about 5% of our new customers on a monthly basis. This is so overlooked by most webmasters. There are so many sites out there just throwing away leads by ignoring their 404 traffic.
Good post. It’s easy to forget to make good 404 pages. and you can only see the difference once you use them… !
Thank you for the tips about customizing 404 error pages.
the custom 404 pages is an old technique but a nice reminder
Great article about something we still see overlooked with clients. Most default (server install) 404 pages are scary to less tech saavy users.It also looks like Google and Yahoo are checking what your server returns when a random location is requested. Yahoo’s Inktomi Slurp & 404 errorsGoogle recommends 404 for missing pages(See near the bottom)
if you have the 404 perfectly redirected to the right landingpage, nothing is wrong. maybe you can even benefit from it!
Great pointers on creating a custom 404 page. Thanks!