Creating a Successful 404 page
We show you how to create a successful 404 page that doesn’t get you into trouble with the search engines.
A 404 page is the page that is displayed if someone goes to a page on your website that isn’t there any more. This can be for a number of reasons like:
- you’ve renamed a page
- a site linking to you got the page name wrong
- you’ve linked yourself to a page that doesn’t exist
Now, if people come to your site and get the standard “page not found” message nothing much is going to happen and that visitor will disappear forever. So you need to develop a page that points people in the right direction.
Additionally, it should be a unique page. If you set up your 404 page to go to your index page or another page on your site you will likely end up with a duplicate content penalty because Google et al then think that the page that is not found has the same content as your index page.
So develop a unique 404 page.
What can you have on this page? Well obviously you should think about your most successful pages and where you want to point people. Generally if you craft your page correctly folks won’t know that they have come to a page that doesn’t exist.
So have links at least to your home page but also to your other popular pages as well. Additionally you may think about adding some advertising to your 404 page if people don’t want to explore your site further.
Once you have set up your page you need to add in the correct code into your .htaccess file. The code tells your browser that if a page doesn’t exist to redirect to your new 404 page.
So develop your 404 page and call it something like 404.html or notfound.html or whatever you want and upload it to your root directory.
Then change your .htaccess file and add in code as follows:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/404.html
and it’s as simple as that.
Then ensure that you have your stats tracking software on the 404 page because then you’ll see exactly where people have come from to reach that page and then you can do something about the incorrect code from other websites or even your own website.
A carefully constructed 404/ not found webpage should keep your visitors on your site or as a minimum earn you some money.
