Increase your traffic by creating a custom 404 error page

Hey everyone, have you ever tried viewing a certain page on a website and instead got the dreaded “404 Not Found” error message? Chances are that you glanced at the URL to check for any typos and then, if none were found, you left the site with a grumble.

Chances are that some of your website’s visitors are doing the same thing. You are losing the visitor and perhaps a potential sale. Also, an unhappy user is not likely to become a repeat visitor.

So why let the life blood of your site (your users, of course) leave unhappy? Instead of presenting them with the standard “The requested page cannot be found…”, give them s...really have no reason not to do. So go do it!

 

Thank you
404 traffic is underestimated & can be very productive.
Remember that a 404 visitor is very suggestible to free offers & such.

 

You might want to go a bit further and redirect to your home page or some other page after the custom 404 is displayed for 5 seconds. This way you salvage more of the traffic you would have normally lost.

 

wats the point of gettin traffic dont it use ur bandwidth up

 

I agree, let it stay for 5 seconds or so , then redirect the traffic to the homepage.

-C

 

I like that suggestion - however, the only issue that I have is that a lot of users now will be browsing with multiple tabs open, and they click a link on one tab then switch to the next one while the link loads. So if a user clicked a link that didn't exist and then switched tabs, the 404 page would show for 5 seconds and then redirect to the homepage, and when the user came back all he/she would see now would be the homepage and wouldn't know what had happened.

 

Some great tips . Keep em coming!

 

Those that browse with multiple tabs open do not remember the reason they clicked on the link anyway LOL, so it would not make any difference if they would see the page they requested or the home page. But at least you have one extra chance to interest them in your site content if you display home page instead of the "sorry, the page is not found" message.

 

You will only confuse the search engines by doing this. A 404 page should return a server 404 HTTP status code to let the search engines know its an error page.

 

Ah yes, this is very true. 404 pages have more reasons than to just inform a human user that the page does not exist.

 

I wonder what is better, to make SEs happy by making a "proper" 404 page or to get another chance with a site visitor....

 

You really need to keep the SE's happy as its your main source of free traffic, well for most of us. Customise the 404 so that you can still bounce visitors to other pages or even onto adverts if they misspell the url or hit a deleted page.

 

I agree that we have to keep SEs happy. I myself am enjoying a steady stream of free SE traffic and making around 700/month from it. I just do not see any reason for overoptimization.

SEs need fresh and unique content.... many of the high PR/high traffic sites do not even have a custom 404 page...

 

There is no reason why you can't keep a visitor on your site even if they hit a 404 page. As long as you include appropriate information and links, they should not be deterred.

 

Shouldn't a good Webmaster NOT have any error pages???

I'm tired tonight, so maybe I am missing something here.

 

You are missing something here LOL You forget about the type-in traffic. Visitors might make a mistake typing the page address (they spelled the domain correctly). If you do not have a 404, then the visitor will get an ugly default 404 this does not add credibility to your site.

Cheers.

 

Can someone please explain to me how this works... e.g. my wesite address is www abc com and someone types www acb com how does my server know that someone typed a wrong url? Or are you saying that we buy the domain acb.com and redierct the user from there?? Thanks

 

The domain name has to be correct, otherwise the browser will just display a DNS error. Custom 404s only work when a user tries to access a non-existent page inside of your site. For example, if your site was abc.com, if they entered abc.com/somepagedfd.php, a custom 404 could handle that. If they entered abd.com, then that has nothing to do with your site.

 

Cool.... thanks for that explanation, it is great to know this specially when I am developing my own website.... cheers

 

Custom 404 pages are great for keeping people at your site once they are already there, but how can I " Increase traffic by creating a custom 404 error page" ?