Why your 404 Page is Important
Posted on : 08-06-2009 | By : Ali Abdullah | In : General, SEO
Tags: 404 page, accessibility, coding, design, duplicative, SEO, Server, URLs, wordpress
Walking an extra mile in design accessibility might cost some time, but with little easy tweaks you could improve site visitor experience and accessibility with a customized 404 error page.
Obviously, a 404 page shown when a visitor reached a url that can’t be found on the server, whatever the reason is your 404 page should deliver a clear message to the visitor and avoid any confusions, and as per Google webmaster central using a soft 404 page is not recommended for SEO reasons as quoted from google webmaster central
We see two kinds of 404 (“File not found”) responses on the web: “hard 404s” and “soft 404s.” We discourage the use of so-called “soft 404s” because they can be a confusing experience for users and search engines. Instead of returning a 404 response code for a non-existent URL, websites that serve “soft 404s” return a 200 response code. The content of the 200 response is often the homepage of the site, or an error page……….
soft 404s are confusing for users, and furthermore search engines may spend much of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicative URLs on your site. This can negatively impact your site’s crawl coverage—because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently.
so we are talking about a hard 404 page that talks to the site visitor.
Have a look at this one of apple as an example of a hard 404 page.
Frequent error pages could happen to your site visitors, now maybe more than before due to the rapid use of rss, social media and bookmarking sites which have thrown your site urls everywhere, or sometimes even a simple copy/paste mistake by the user. Therefore, customizing your 404 page is a must whether you have a simple wordpress blog or several thousands url website.
Customizing it is easy because the 404 page can be a normal standard HTML page, here are suggestions I found useful to share for creating a good one that avoid your site from navigating away and also help them find what they are looking for:
- Talk in a user friendly languague and not as a webmaster and tell your site visitor that url can not be found, also specify reasons if you can.
- Your 404 page should be part of your website and all site header primary navigation bar should at least exist.
- Offer more help, add search bar and suggest searching for the topic the user is looking for, or add a “recent posts” widget for better access.
- Use google Enhance 404 widget to embed a search box and even google widget will suggest the correct site url to the user.
If you are using wordpress then this page is easily editable using the Appearance Tab in your Dashboard, click on editor and you will find a 404.php page that comes with the theme. Simply add any widget, search bar or anything in between the code <div id=”content” in this page and it will apprear nicely in your blog 404 page.
