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Custom 404 error pages and the SEO |
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Wednesday, 22 August 2007
/ Kshitij Ahuja
Often we tend to ignore things that can be very useful. In this article we talk about the custom 404 error pages and how they help in SEO, besides their obvious role.
Page Not Found
You type a url in the web browser or follow a link somewhere and are often greeted by "Page Not Found" message. These are error pages, more specifically 404 error pages which are returned when the requested url is not found. There can be many reasons for this unavailability like broken links, a page that previously existed at a location but have been moved to a new location and many others. We are not going to get into more of these causes. Lets discuss the main topic, how a custom 404 helps in SEO.
It's a loss of traffic
Most of you must have observed that often the unavailability of a good custom 404 error page, you are left with a very few links (and in some cases, not even a single one) to follow from the 404 error page. Many times the users don't even bother to return to the website, which means loss of traffic to the website. Yes, you heard right, a loss of valuable visitors that could have been converted into clients.
In SEO, one of our aim is to retain the visitor. We use many means for this, like writing good content, navigation, minimum broken links etc. However here, we are loosing traffic which itself is one the key factors in search engine optimization. By now, i am sure you can guess how important it is to have a custom 404 error page. Yes, we must use it to retain our visitors.
Retaining your visitors
A well designed custom 404 error page, gives users a lot of options and links to follow, besides telling them that the url they typed is not available. If user is really interested in the specific url, he or she will definitely try to check the url if its correctly typed or alternatively they will opt to use one of the many other links in the customized 404 error page.
Note it, we should have a lot of links pointing to other pages so that even if the users out of track due to some broken link or unavailable page, and lands on our custom 404 page, he or she can instantly get back to relevant topic on the site.
Spiders can continue indexing your site
A broken link to user can result in loss of prospect client. However in some cases, if the user has some patience he might continue all over again or take the path from your home page. But what about search engine spiders? They are not intelligent enough to consider alternatives. They just follow links in your web page. Naturally, if you don't have any link to follow, search engine spiders won't have any way to proceed and will simply leave your website. This might prevent an important part of your website being parsed by spiders and thus preventing it from being indexed.
However a well designed custom 404 page with good links can guide spiders to the remaining sections of your website thereby helping proper indexing of your web pages.
All in all, while optimizing a website for search engines, a custom 404 should be there with proper navigation to almost all the major sections of the website, and obviously the main purpose it has to serve, an error message telling user that there is a problem and he can use alternative links to continue enjoying the website. |
