Articles | Handling Your 404 Page Properly - The Diigo Meta page

• 11 Oct 08
  

  Suzannah Porter

  How to handle your 404 pages in an SEO friendly way.

  Articles Blogging Web Design SEO 404 Pages

  • We don’t know for sure if Google pays much attention to the site 404 pages but it does show them within Webmaster Tools report as an error that makes many webmasters nervous.

    
    

    Anyway handling your 404 page properly is an essential part of on-site optimization that is helpful both for your site visitors and search engines.

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  • 4 more annotations...

  • • Both people and search engine spiders might get to an error page because:

      
      
      • A page linked to externally (internally) was moved/deleted;
      • You/your HTML editor confuses relative and absolute URLs;
      • Spammers generate non-existent URLs followed by a search engine;
      • A (socially) bookmarked page was moved/deleted.

    • Once Google Webmaster Tools report a number of 404 pages:

      
      
      
      
      1. Make sure you do not link to non-existent pages throughout your site - Xenu is a great free tool to search for broken links on your site.
      2. Make sure your server returns the proper 404 header when redirecting from the non-existent page. A 404 error is meant to alert you, you visitors an search engines that the page no longer exists. (This Google Groups thread, for example, describes the case when a non-existent page was using 302 redirect to 404.php, which returned a ‘200 OK’.)
      3. Include important navigation links at your 404 page: this will both give your readers and search spiders an alternative to go. The following links are recommended at a 404 page: links to popular posts/articles, a link to the home page, a link to your site map.
      4. If you have multiple 404 pages reported that follow the same pattern (often: /search.php?xxx, member.php&xxx etc) - block them with robots.txt to make Google forget about them.
      5. Set up automatic notification once 404 page is visited - you will thus have good chances to find out about the errors before Google.
    • For 404 notification I am using internally built script for my sites.
      
      I also heard that this WordPress plugin for 404 notification might be useful (but never tried it myself).

    • • Pratheep
        on May 14, 2008 at 4:34 am
        

        
        
        
        

        I have custom 404 page for the website, but still i can see a huge list of pages listed in my webmaster tool. how to eliminate it. should we completely block those pages from the bot?

        
        

        FYI: we have removed many pages of our old html website and it is creating the 404 problem.

        
        

        Pratheep

        
        
        
        
        
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        Ann Smarty
        on May 14, 2008 at 4:46 am
        

        
        
        
        

        @Pratheep - the best way to handle this is to remove ALL references to the nonexistent pages from your site and wait. After the bot revisits your site and sees no references to them, it will update the WT stats (in a time).

        
        

        You can also block these pages with Robots.txt if they belong to one non-existent directory.

• 13 May 08
  

  peterwyspianski

  404

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