How To Utilize Your 404 Pages
Learn how to utilize your 404 pages. Having a standard 404 page is terrible for SEO. Also you lose out on additional traffic and potential revenue. Learn how to utilize your 404 pages.
Have you ever heard of “Baby Boomers”? In the blogosphere, we have our own generation of “Blogger Boomers”. With 2006 finally at an end… what we are left with here in 2007, are literally thousands and thousands of blog sites that have been established early in 2006. Of course I am NOT even including the countless sites that were launched prior. As more content is published, the source pages to older content sometimes tend to disappear.
Blogging is much different than static html web page design (popular in late 90’s to early 2000’s.) Most old and non-updated static content seems to always linger in digital cyberspace, (check dir.yahoo.com for example.) and never seem to vanish.
In other words, bloggers can sometimes tend to jump ship or simply pack up and move around quite a bit. What we are left with are thousands of 404 pages with traffic just pouring into them and leaving just as quickly as they arrived. Ultimately, we have thousands of wasted visits. Dead page… click back on your browser, and then click the next listing on Google’s SERP.
On a site titled, “Eches Blog“, I read an article titled, “Turn 404 Error Page Into Money“ that really motivated me to learn how to utilize my 404 pages. I am not sure if I am going to advertise on them (probably not). Ideally, I would like to figure out a way to try to reduce my 404 pages all together. But, you will always have some, unless you micromanage your reports and purposely create static pages that replicate the exact url that caused the error. Ideally, I would like to create a 404 page that still looks good to the Google bots but also presents useful information to my viewers (such as a manual redirect to the post that moved, or an invitation to back to my home page).
No matter what, after reading that article, it does get me thinking about How To Utilize my 404 Pages more wisely. What kind of tricks do you have up your sleeve? What are some ideas you would like to share about the different ways you utilize your 404 pages?
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Thanks mate for the backlink..very much appreciated..To be honest, I myself havent modified my 404 error page yet, dont have luxury time to tinker it. I’m thinking of putting subtle decor with a link back to main page. That will suffice as far as visitors and SEO are concerned.
eches
3 Jan 07 at 12:10 pm
You are welcome for the backlink… it is a great article that got me to thinking…
There are two issues at hand:
1.) Utilizing the 404 page for visits is much easier than doing it for SEO. With visitors you can tell them “Hey, this content has been moved, or doesn’t exist anymore… sorry! But I want to invite you to our home page to read even better content”. With SEO that’s all different. You can tell a Google Bot, sorry… the relevant content you were wanting to cache isn’t there anymore, but if you want to, crawl to my homepage and start your search there. Granted, the bot might or might not do that… but no matter what, you lose SEO points. A Google Bot knows its 404 page, there isn’t anything you can do to change it. It will know. You can’t hide it from a bot. It is an error, and having errors on your pages is not a good thing.
The more time I have had to think about all this over the last day, I don’t think there is anything you can do to make a 404 page look good in Google’s eyes.
Ultimately, my final opinion on this matter is… it is best NOT to create any 404 pages all together. They are BAD. And if you are willing to invest the time into utilizing them, that time could have been better used correcting the pages in the first place… because, again… these are error pages. Errors and mistakes should be dealt with, not utilized. You know what I mean?
Having all that said, looks like I am going to be investing a night into correcting all my 404 error pages within all my sites… Yuck! lol
Garry Conn
3 Jan 07 at 6:32 pm
Yeah I got it
An error page is always an error page, no matter how appealing it looks like. The bottom line is we can’t cheat bots and the way to deal with it is by fixing all the error pages. Thanks for englightenment!
eches
5 Jan 07 at 12:30 am
lol
You are welcome!
Garry Conn
5 Jan 07 at 1:14 am