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404 Errors Drive Visitors Away

By Suzi Ziegler in Featured

A “Page not found” message – also called a 404 error message – is the standard response from a web server when it can’t find a requested URL, or web address.

Imagine driving across town to visit a business and finding a “Closed” sign on the door during open hours. A 404 message is like that “Closed” sign – it says your site isn’t open for business. If you’re trying to do business on the web, you want to make sure your site can be easily found, around the clock.

The web is like a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week mall. People expect websites to be available all the time. When someone clicks a link to your website and gets a “Page not found” error, they’ll likely regard your website as broken, or nonexistent. If they’re really motivated, they might try to find your website by other means. If they aren’t strongly motivated, they won’t.

Why Do 404 Errors Occur?

Anyone can receive a 404 message if they’re trying to get to your site by clicking on a broken link. This is the most common cause of 404 errors.

A link can become broken for a number of reasons. People often rewrite web page URLs when they’re redesigning their site, or they may try to enhance search engine optimization (SEO) by including keywords in the URLs.

When a URL gets rewritten, any link to that page using the old URL is instantly broken. It can’t take someone to the page anymore.

How to Avoid 404 Errors

Help would-be visitors to your site avoid the dreaded “Page not found” error by following these tips:

• Submit new pages to search engines immediately.

1. Submit to Google
2. Submit to Bing

• Read Link Juice: Save Every Drop for tips on making sure links to old pages are changed to point to the new pages. The article includes a list of tools for locating your old links, both on your own site and around the web.
• If you’ve changed the URL for a page on your website, redirect visitors to the new page from the old one, using a 301 redirect.
• You can also redirect people manually. You can revise the web page at an old URL, inviting people to visit your new page. Make sure you include a link to the new page. It’s also good to offer your contact information if you think people may be confused and may need to communicate with you directly. It’s a good way to build trust with your site visitors.
• You can check with your web hosting company to see if it offers a 404 redirect. When a user enters the URL for an old page, your web hosting company can redirect a visitor to a page you specify, instead of returning a 404 error.
• Stay organized by recording changes to your site. Then you can go back and fix links when you’re done.

Mistypes and 404 Errors

People can get a 404 error if they mistype your website’s domain name in the navigation bar of their web browser.

You can’t account for every possible mistyping of your domain name. But if your domain name is easy to mistype or misspell, you can purchase these commonly mistyped domain names. Then create a 301 redirect from each of the mistypes back to your website. It’s a good way to capture website visitors who might otherwise go astray.

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Check out how your home page looks to search engines and people with the free Home Page Analysis. Want a deeper look at all your site’s pages? Try an AboutUs Site Report.

This article was contributed by Suzi Ziegler of AboutUs.org (visit). Suzi shares her love of words with AboutUs.org as a writer and editor. Have a question for Ms. Ziegler? Contact her here…

Using a 302 Redirect in Place of a 404 Error is a Bad Idea

By Ross Dunn in Featured

If your site is currently treating unavailable pages (404 errors) like temporary redirects (302 redirects) you may not have any problems with the search engines but your site is losing out on some important advantages of a proper 404 error.

The Way a 404 Normally Works

This is how a 404 normally works on a website when a search engine, let’s use Google, visits a URL (i.e address) on your website that cannot be found that was previously spidered/indexed as functional:

1. The visit produces a 404 error from the server.
   A 404 error is  provided by your server when an Internet client (i.e. a browser, search engine, etc.) reaches a URL on your site that can not be produced by your server because it is no longer there or it is incorrect.
2. The first time Google encounters this 404 error, it does not remove your URL but it takes note the page is not available and the broken link/missing address will be mentioned in your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard for you to fix ASAP.
3. The second time Google encounters the 404 error it is a good bet the page will be removed from its index and the error will remain in your Webmaster Tools dashboard for fixing. Google will continue to find the broken link until it is fixed, at which point any associated rankings you had for this page can work their way back up to where they were.

Using a 302 Redirect Response Instead of a 404 Error Response

Here is the situation: when a search engine visits a URL that no longer exists, your server delivers a 302 redirect response instead of the proper 404 response. The 302 response is essentially this – “this page is being temporarily redirected” to a page you defined (i.e. your home page). As a result, Google does not see the 404 and Google will retain any search rankings the URL may have because it is expecting the old URL to resurface. In theory, that sounds like a good thing because you get to keep your old ranking (temporarily) while Google visitors are redirected seamlessly to your home page (the page you chose to redirect to).

Why Isn’t this a Good Idea?

1. Visitors end up being rerouted to your home page oblivious to the redirect and end up on a page that may or may not have any relevance to their original search. Not only is this likely to cause an undesirable reaction but it also makes Google look incompetent… something the search engine is not likely to favour you for.
2. Since a 404 is not triggered, there is no way to determine if pages are broken on your website (unless a custom report has been created).
3. 302 redirects do not pass PageRank – so unless the original page is restored, much of the benefit from the links to your old content will evaporate with time.
4. If this practice is utilized site-wide it is conceivable your website rankings would diminish due to the myriad of confusing “temporary” signals provided by your site.

What is the Best Solution?

1. If you have been using 302 redirects in place of a 404, then I strongly recommend restoring the 404 protocol.
2. Create a custom error page for 404s which will give visitors that encounter your error page an indication of how to get back on track. Once Google finds the 404 errors on your site they will be reported to you in your Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Whenever you, as a webmaster, encounter a reported 404 error on your website it is best to quickly 301 (permanently) redirect old URLs to content that is closely relevant to the past content. Not only will this help you to keep visitors to your site happy but 301 redirects will pass forward the critical PageRank (ie. Google credibility) that may have been built on the old URL.

Additional Relevant Content

Here are some tools and articles that are relevant to this article:

• Server Header Checker Tool: using this tool you can see what responses particular web pages on any website are providing to Internet client (i.e. a browser, search engine, etc.)
• Permanent 301 versus Temporary 302 Redirects: read Scott Van Achte’s article on how these two redirects differ and when each is best utilized.
• Increase Your Links with Google Webmaster Tools: here is a simple trick to use the reports in Google Webmaster Tools to increase your site’s chances for success.
• How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URLs: This is a tutorial on how to redirect your non-www domain (http://yourdomain.com) to your www version (http://www.yourdomain.com) in order to consolidate PageRank and minimize one form of duplicate listings/content in search engines.
• How to Redirect an Old Domain to a New Domain
• A page full of Free  Web Site Marketing Tutorials and SEO Tips
• Our Recommended Web Marketing Tools: tried and true tools for search engine optimization (SEO), competitor analysis tools and even useful programs like a powerful password manager we couldn’t live without (direct link), can all be found here.

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Ross Dunn is the CEO/Founder at StepForth Web Marketing Inc.; based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Ross’s articles and those of the veteran StepForth team at news.stepforth.com or contact us at www.stepforth.com, Tel – 250-385-1190, Toll Free – 877-385-5526, Fax – 250-385-1198

Google Webmaster Tools Now Reveals Crawl Error Sources

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Big news from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog today.

For years, webmasters have been asking Google for a way to identify the sources of 404 Not Found errors that are listed in the “Crawl Errors” feature of Webmaster Tools.  This week, they’ve added a “Linked From” column that lists the number of pages that link to a specific “Not found” URL.  Clicking on an item in the “Linked From” column opens a separate dialog box which lists each page that linked to this URL (both internal and external) along with the date it was discovered. You can even download all your crawl error sources to an Excel file. You can read the official post about the feature here.

Why is this helpful? Well, you can use the source information to fix the broken links in your site, place redirects to a more appropriate URL on your site and/or contact the webmasters linking to missing pages or using malformed links and ask them to fix the links. For those of you who aren’t familiar with 404 errors, Matt Cutts has a more detailed post on the new feature.

If your webserver doesn’t comprehend 404s or fetch error pages very well, Google has also introduced a widget for Apache or IIS that consists of 14 lines of JavaScript that you can paste into your custom 404 page template to helps your visitors find what they’re looking. It provides suggestions based on the incorrect URL.

The new Crawl Error Sources feature has got to be the easiest way to obtain inbound links to your site in a short space of time and best of all, the method is Google approved!

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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