Whats the best way to use a 404? Could I redirect to my home page, would that affect serps in any way? How do you use your 404's? I've never setup a custom one, looking for tips for this and other error pages.
For a recent client I setup the 404 page to also contain a search box (not a Google search box) for their site so the user can perform a search to maybe find something similar to what they were looking for.
In my book, redirecting 404 to the homepage is about the worst things you can do for both user experience and usability points of view. If a page is not found, I, user, would like to know so and be presented with a mini-sitemap of some kind on the same page. How am I supposed to know that being redirected to the mainpage is a result of a page I requested not being found? My conclusion would be that something is just misconfigured. In general, I would be very careful with redirecting (either temp or perm) to the main page from the SEO point of view.
also redirecting 404's IMO is a no-no as well, say for e.g. your searching google, and going thru the results on page 10, you click a link and it leads to a google 404, then redirects you back home, that will mean you will have to search again and go thru the pages, but if you offer a 404 page with a mini site-map or whatever on the user can either visit a link or press the back button, skip the dodgy link and carry on searching.
I redirect my 404's to parked pages. So far it's working out very well. Some people simply type a url wrong or attempt to phish your site for admin areas and whatnot. I started doing the redirect to parking about a week ago. It's paying off very well. I just started with a few sites and I think I will do about $100 this month from it. Not bad pickup from 404's. Funny thing too since what really happened was an old site of mine with Matt's Script wwwboards was getting spammed for pr0n. The site got nailed with terrible keywords. This is an old and fairly dead site but suddenly it was getting 1000 uniques a day. The site ranks top 20 for at least 20 pr0n keywords. Well I took down the spam but of course it created 404's. Since the site isn't a pr0n site I decided to redirect any 404's to a parked page for clicks that is adult related. Lo and behold....I am doing well with it. So I took a few more sites that I know get 404's and pointed the traffic.
wouldn't that become annoying? I mean even though it got spammed, wouldn't legitimate users get annoyed?