SEO Step By Step Guide–28. Dealing with 404 Errors

Whenever a user tries to visit a page, if the request if successful the server will return a 200-OK response. If it does not find the right page that has been requested by the user, then it will return 404-Page not found error. This can happen when you have a broken link or if one of your pages have been moved and it has not been redirected properly. This can also happen when the user mistypes the URL. In all these situations it indicates that the client is able to communicate with the server but the request is not successful because the requested page cannot be found.

How does this affect your website’s ranking? When your website constantly returns 404 errors, it gives a good reason for the search engines can remove you from the index. The presumptions here are that your site is not yet complete or under construction, it is not updated properly or maintained properly so it is not a credit worthy site to be assigned a good rank.

Therefore, you must try to make sure that your site returns no 404 errors as this will affect your site’s rankings. Besides that it will also irritate the users when they constantly find 404 pages in your website and you can lose those visitors for good to your competitors. All of us know how difficult to get a potential lead and to waste such a lead will be absolutely imprudent.

You can use a custom designed 404 page that will help the visitor find what they want in your site. You can also use a 301 redirect to take the visitor to the home page or other relevant page in your site. However, you need to remember that even if you use a redirect to move the visitor to a different page, the server status code will still return a 404 error. So it is best to keep your site free from such errors and use other strategies to help you retain your visitor when 404 errors are unavoidable.

You can also use a custom designed 404 error page. It is highly helpful because almost 50% of the people who meet with a 404 page try to look for that page again thinking that they have typed the URL wrongly or there is something wrong with their internet connection. You must utilize this interest of the visitor to keep them in your site by providing them alternative options.

It is also important to make sure that your server does not return a 200 OK status code for a 404 error. This will lead to duplicate content issues because your 404 page will also be indexed and when all such errors are indexed, search engines will find the same content on all these pages and penalize the site for duplicate content. Therefore it is important to get the right status code. When it is a 404-error then that page will not be indexed and if it happens to be one of your old pages which has been deleted or moved, which is still in the cache, it will be removed in the following listing. On the other hand if it returns 200-OK status, this will be indexed but with the ‘Page cannot be found.’ error message. You should not allow this to happen.

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