What’s a 404 page, bro? It’s that page that lets your peeps know when they’ve hit a dead end – the page they’re looking for has done a Houdini, it ain’t there no more.
Slapping on a custom page for this is a real score, particularly for search engine big guns like Google. The search bots crawl all over your website, indexing every nook and cranny, and yep, that includes your 404.
One way to swing it is to do a redirect, but don’t get too carried away with it. Sure, you could pull a switcheroo, but then search engines (like our buddy Google) would get all confused and your website could come up with a big fat “Page not found” instead of your slick homepage. And while you’re messing around with this, you could accidentally trick the search engine into de-indexing non-existent pages. So, in street talk, that same redirect could accidentally get your homepage kicked off the index.
The other way, the smarter way, is to roll out a custom page. You can do this using your CMS (like WordPress) or your regular old HTML pages. Instead of just slapping on a “404, page not found” or “you’ve landed here by mistake”, here’s a few ideas:
- Make your page chatty. Add a “Bummer, this page is MIA”, but don’t stop there. Give ’em a way to holla at you, maybe an email address or a contact form.
- Chuck in a few cherry-picked links that might tickle their fancy. A handful of cool links should do it.
- Make sure your page fits the vibe of your site. A boring 404 is a real pain in the neck, and if it’s bare bones, your visitor might just bail and hit up another site.
- Don’t forget to add your sidebar or navigation to the page. It’s just as handy as those special links and it broadens the chance that your visitor will stick around and surf your site.
- Double-check that your 404 page is actually playing ball and returning a 404 error. You can do this by using Google Webmaster Tools.