You know creating a 404 page is quite useful and actually I don’t even think I got ours up. I better work on that. Anyhow the reason a 404 page is good to have is because you don’t want someone clicking on a link and then your website not being there. When you have a 404 page lay the navigational structure out to on it, or have some type of site map to give them options into other parts of your website. I don’t know if you notice or not, but a lot of people will do a 404 page, but not 301 redirect them inbound links which I guess it really wouldn’t matter unless you had some good quality links pointing to your missing pages, but reguardless I always recommend using a 301 redirect for everything just for the simple fact that it will pass page rank juice into your website.

You can view more on 404 pages and how to set one up at Hot to Set Up a Custom 404 File Not Found. Its pretty simple process basically alls you do is insert a line of code into your htaccess file. If I’m right I think some web hosting companies might have the 404 button in there control panel so you can set it up in there, and not have to edit the .htacces file. Just make sure you add your 301 in there :).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.