What is Error 404 Page? How to configure Error 404 page? part 1
What is Error 404 Page?
Whenever the visitor to your site asks for a page that is not available on your site, the Error 404 “Page not found” message will be displayed. The 404 or Page Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code which indicates that the visitor was able to communicate with the server but the server could not find the page which was requested.
The default error 404 page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.
What Causes Error 404 Page:
There can be many reasons you will see error 404 pages. Some of them are given below.
Renaming pages: Sometimes when you have first created the website you would have named the page as internet_marketing_insights.html and after starting the Search engine optimization you would have renamed into internet-marketing-insights.html for search engine friendliness. If this is the case, please make sure that all these URL’s are redirected by 301 redirection to their respective URL’s.
Revamping the Site: You would have decided to revamp your site and convert the website from asp to aspx. Here also you can use 301 redirect.
Moving a page: Some of the webmasters, for whatever reason decides to reorganize their site. For example some medical supplies website first decides to keep ‘Fair & Lovely Cream’ under ‘Skin Care’ and now decides to place it in ‘Cosmetics’.
Mistyping by Visitors: Sometimes you are running an offline campaign and the user mistypes the URL in the browser, he will get the Error 404 page.
Back Links: Some of the back links to your site will be leading to your old URL’s which is no longer available. You can request the website owners to correct the URL linked to your site.
Internal links: Internal links in your website may be linked to incorrect URL’s. You can correct this by changing the linking URL’s in the code. For example; you would have linked to www.example.com/sem.html instead of www.example.com/marketing/sem.html.
Recent survey indicates that more than 75% of visitors who receives Error 404 Page never make a second attempt to find a missing page. We will be missing these visitors if we are not going to tackle this issue.
Custom Error 404 Page : 10 Tips To Create Custom Error 404 Page
- Create a custom error 404 page with the same look and feel with the navigation links as the rest of your site.
- Write the error message in plain language which can be understandable to even a non-technical user. Use friendly and apologetic language.
- Your custom error 404 page should list the most common errors in accessing the files on the site.
- Provide spell check functionality for the error URL’s
- Provide the users to report a broken link. You custom error 404 page can have a link to the webmaster or a form.
- Provide search box with a link to your site’s search engine. If the site does not have one, use from Google’s ‘Enhance 404 widget’ provided in Google webmaster tool.
- Avoid 301 redirect or 302 redirection.
- Create this Custom Error 404 Page with a size more than 512 bytes as Internet explorer versions 5 and below do not support you custom error 404 page with a size less than 512 bytes.
- Avoid ad display in you custom error 404 page.
- Above all your Custom error 404 page should return an actual 404 HTTP status code. For this you have to configure your web server accordingly.
Find and Fix Broken Links using Google Webmaster Tools
In my previous posts I have explained about Error 404 page not found and tip to create Custom 404 Page. Among the reasons behind this error 404 page, it was explained about Back links and Internal Links.
Let us go through these points once again. “Back Links: Some of the back links to your site will be leading to your old URL’s which is no longer available. You can request the website owners to correct the URL linked to your site.
Internal links: Internal links in your website may be linked to incorrect URL’s. You can correct this by changing the linking URL’s in the code. For example; you would have linked to www.example.com/sem.html instead of www.example.com/marketing/sem.html.”
We can easily find these broken links and fix it using Google Webmaster tools. By removing these broken links we can reduce the unsatisfied customer who receives error 404 page on clicking these broken links.
If you have verified your site with Google webmaster tools log into your account. If you don’t have one, create an account with Google webmaster tools which will help you to optimize your site with respect to Google.
In your dashboard click on the ‘Crawl errors’ under ‘Diagnostics’.
Now click on to ‘Not found’.
Click on the link given under ‘Linked from’, you will get the details of pages from where the links to your pages are broken or leading to the error 404 page.
If the broken links are from your internal pages correct them or if your broken links are from external website request the webmaster of that site to correct the links.
source: http://seo-insights.blogspot.com/search/label/Error%20404%20Page
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