Page Not Found - Why The 404 Page Can Be Your Best Friend
Custom 404 pages are probably still one of the most overlooked things by both SEO firms an in-house SEO teams. The problem is that not enough people are educated on the 404 and why you need to have a customized one for your visitors. The 404 error message, or Not Found, is an HTTP standard response code that basically means that the client is able to connect with the server but that the server could not find the page requested. This usually happens when a user mistypes a URL or when you have broken links to pages that do not exist anymore. You would be surprised how often the 404 page gets served!
The Problem
The problem for the user is that a standard blank white 404 page with that standard text can be confusing for users. They may feel that they are on the wrong site or, even worse, that your site is down! Plus that standard 404 page gives the user no where to go, there is no navigation there to take the user back to your site. So many times you can lose that precious visitor, that you have spent so much time and effort to get, because you did not have a custom 404 page.
What is a Custom 404 Page?
A custom 404 page, at its most basic level, is a 404 error page that you design to have links back to your site so that the user can click back to the site and get back on track. The sky is the limit from there! You should have compelling text letting the user know what happened, why they are at that page, and how to get back. Many companies are now getting clever and are creating very funny 404 error pages to entertain the users and kind of apologize, through laughter, to the visitor. This is the 404 page for the eVisibility, the company I work for.
Others use the entire navigation, search box, RSS feed, advertisers, links to popular posts, news links and more. Others out the search box on their 404 pages, or add a link to their sitemap. All of these things are good because if a spider finds a 404 page they will continue to crawl and index the entire site and not get stopped by a 404 page. Here are some other great 404 pages that people have done:
The bottom line is that in order to make your site more user friendly for your visitors and the search engine spiders, you need to have a customized 404 error page. Plus it gives you the opportunity to express your creativity and to be witty, just look at some of the examples in this post!
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Fury … 404 pages rock.
It is amazing the amount of backlinks website owners missout on due to typos in the backlinks and a missing custom 404 page.
Thank you so much for my first comment, you rock Steve!
Rather than have a custom 404 page I just direct 404 errors to the index page. I am not sure if this is a good thing though. Good for SEO maybe, but for thes user I am not so sure about it. If someone is looking for a specific page, and they do not get a 404 page, then they may assume that they are on the correct page, and be put of by the fact it is possibly irrelevant. So, which is best, cust 404 or redirecting 404 to index? The code in the config file to redirect to index is simply: ErrorDocument 404 /
Webologist, you pose a good question, but I think that you have already answered that for your self. Visitors may get confused if you redirect to the homepage. You would be surprised at the ingnorance of most of the people online.
And plus, making really cool and creative 404 error pages is more fun!