Don't waste your 404's

ok the idea is not to lose the visitors... but what's the use of showing a picture with some text in the 404 error page? How will that bring visitors to real pages?
Isn't it easyer to do a redirection? even a META redirection is more usefull... anyway, that's what i do...

 

you will get penalized in search engines for meta redirect.

 

who will get penalised? the 404 pages? i doubt it can affect the real content pages...

 

I just direct them to the homepage, using a custom 404.

 

I created a special 404 page

It's a selling page to get folks to get into the site

Sell Sell Sell guys

 

fryman is right, you must get your users back to your website. its just common-sense usability issue. a sitemap on that page is wise.

i wouldn't worry about monitizing a 404

 

I do this as well. 404 pages are crap.

 

Just curious because I haven't customized my error pages...is that a live link to your webpage?

 

it should be an option in your cpanel to create custom 404 pages.

 

It would help a lot if the image was a link to your homepage. Right now I would have to type in the URL to get there, and I can promise you the vast majority of people will not do that.

 

I did a redirect to the homepage by placing this rule in the .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://xxxxx.com/404.php

Will this be penalized by the search engines?

I'm planning to do the same with the 403. Anyone see a potential problem?

 

if you try to access a non existing page of your site, does it bring you to /404.php ?

 

I never waste my 404.. check it out how I have integrated it with my site layout so the visitors never exits my site without any information.
cooljeba.com/asdasdasfsdgfsdfsdfsdf.html

try it and I guess it surely helps in long run

..:: peace ::..
Jeba

 

No, it brings you to the homepage. You actually see the incorrect extension dropped from the url and it goes directly to the homepage (or whatever page you want it to go to.)

 

cooljeba i've seen that on other sites and now i remember it

i like it and i'll do the same thing, just in case the meta redirect affects my site

 

Did you duplicate your homepage on the 404?

 

I run a hosting company with default 404 google search my customer site. I can easily get 1-2usd per day just for the search. Make the default "search the site instead of search the web" will give you far better results. Don't just display adsense on 404 because i think this is against the TOS as there is no conent on the page.

 

it's not duplicated, the 404 page contains only the lay out of the index (menu/header/etc) check acvarist.ro/grgreg

it doesn't contain the content box from the index so they can't be seen as identical by se

 

That's clever!

I actually have more 403 - Forbidden (my images are protected) 12,000+ already this month! Do you see any reason why your method or mine wouldn't work with 403?

 

another reason for which i prefer the actual 404 page instead of redirection to the main page is that visitors can understand what happends... if i use redirection and someone tries a non existing page and gets redirected to the homepage he/she may wander "what the hell happened, is this site stupid?"

also if the page is bookmarked, setting the error message will make the visitor unbookmark it and search for the new page location