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Getting the most from your 404 page (not found page)
Wil Reynolds
October 7, 2002

Yes, you need to optimize your 404 page

You have seen them, the 404 page, it is the page that comes up on your screen that says "page not found", don't you just love getting those? Sometimes it feels like the web is just littered with page load errors. Well, 404 pages are inevitable, they are going to happen, just like you hate receiving them, so do your customers and clients. No site is totally immune to 404 errors, and you should assume that they are going to happen on YOUR site. I visited hundreds of sites recently that do not have a 404 page and I was thinking that there is really no better way to annoy your web site visitors than to give them a standard 404 page with nothing on it but "page not found". So it prompted me to write this article.

Have you wondered how do 404's come about? It happens very easily, the #1 way that your site has 404 errors is when you or maybe that intern that is not longer around moves files around on your web server. Web site relaunches often lead to an increase in 404 errors, just check out your log files. When you relaunch your site, what happens to the old site? Let's say that your products page used to be named

http://www.mysite.com/info.html
and now in the relaunch it somehow gets renamed to http://www.mysite.com/information.html
What happens to the old page? If it was deleted then guess what? Many visitors may access that old (non-existant page) and get a page not found error.

How do users get to pages that don't exist on your site any longer? They have probably:

Bookmarked your site
Access a specific page from a search engine
Forwarded that specific URL to a friend
Made an error typing your site in the URL bar
Technically there are numerous ways around this problem. One of the more popular ways is to not delete the old pages, and instead create a re-direct to the new page. This works, but requires you to create re-directs for each old page on your site. This course of action still requires some babysitting, each time a file is moved you have to know it and create a re-direct page. If you are not the person doing the server maintenance, can you be sure that a redirect is done every time for every page? You can't.

So what is the best way to ensure you don't turn your users away with a "page not found" error page? You create a 404 page that has:

Links to the top 10 entry points on your site

A search box
A prominent link to the FAQ
A prominent link to the site map
To find the top 10 entry points on your site take a look at your web traffic statistics, one of the reports you should have is top 10 entry points. If your site is small then you might want to narrow it down to 3 or 4 pages, but give users some options!

Could you be giving your competitors more business?
If your industry is highly commodotized and a user can't find what they want on your site they will go elsewhere, you know that, you probably do it yourself. Knowing this to be true the question I ask is so why aren't you designing killer 404 pages for your site?

It is your job to do everything in your power to keep web site visitors (who are really potential customers) from going elsewhere, and a 404 page with no real information does not help you, instead it helps to lead more people to your competitors' web sites, while making your site seem difficult to navigate and unprofessional. If someone told you that there was a link or endorsement on your web site to your competitors' you would be quite upset, right? You would want it removed right away!
A bad 404 page is really a link to your competition, because a user will just hit the back button to a search engine and go to the next link that does work.

Verifying that your 404 page is working
Check out your 404 page loads in your web site traffic analysis program. How many of your users got a 404 page and then clicked on a link? What does that tell you? If the majority of your users click on a link on the custom 404 page then your 404 page is working. It is giving users other options that they can then take action on instead of leaving your site and going elsewhere. You can find this out in your log files, one of your goals should be to constantly lower the percentage of users that get a 404 page and don't click on a link.

Impact on search engines
Having a good 404 page also helps with getting your site indexed by the search engines. If your 404 page is the standard 404 "page not found" page then just like there are no links for a human to follow, there is nothing for a search engine to follow and index. If your page is a re-direct then the search engine may penalize you if the re-direct is too fast or it may not read the redirect at all if it is in JavaScript. When search engine spiders get 404 pages they often remove those pages from their index because the 404 is a dead end without any content.

Hopefully these pointers will help you get more mileage out of your 404 pages, I am open for discussion, so if you are interested please drop me a line.

[Note: This message has been edited by xelA]

Thanks again!