What are 404 Errors? A Page Without A Home.

The Error 404 “Page not found” is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. It is an HTTP standard response code displayed when the server could not find the page. It often happens when a site changes their layout, internal linking or moves or transitions their site to a different infrastructure.

Why are 404 Errors so Bad? An Ugly Sabotage of Your Rankings? Not Exactly…

…but they are ugly!

First of all, 404 Errors are ugly and bad user experiences for site visitors. Essentially, it’s a dead end- a page that usually confuses users, leaving them with no option but to close the window or smartly click the back button (many don’t know to do this). It hurts your site credibility and frustrates people using the site.

Additionally, on Google’s Webmaster Blog, they go into detail about the damage that is and isn’t done by 404 Errors. To summarize, they realize these errors are going to happen, but they want you to fix them as much as possible. They state:

“404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”).”

Google doesn’t necessarily like them, but won’t kill you for them. With everything considered, 404′s should be handled correctly for the sake of your users. So, let’s address how this is done.

How Can I Prevent 404 Errors?

Three ways to avoid 404 errors include:

Redirects: In the .htaccess file on your root directory you can create redirects to the correct pages. Particularly helpful if pages consistently keep getting 404 errors.

Robots.txt file: If you have pages of your site that change all the time, or sections that need frequent alterations, you can simply block search engines from indexing these pages within the robots.txt file on your root directory.

Log files: Web server log files track 404 errors. If you access these log files you can view the 404 errors and look to make the necessary changes (fix links, restore pages, misspellings, etc.). If you are using WordPress for your site/blog, these logs can be easily seen if you’ve installed the SEO Ultimate plugin (check out our review of this great SEO worpress plugin).

What If I Miss Something? At Least Make it Pretty.

As Google mentioned above, 404 Errors are going to happen. Chances are you will miss some of them. A great best practice is to create a customized 404 Error page that helps users know what has happened and identifies what they can do to get back to the site. It’s a good chance to add some personality to your site- and may even win over some fans, as you respectfully apologize and redirect the visitor.

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One of the most effective example is shown here. It includes some personality, explanation of what has happened and some alternative directions to help the visitors know where they can go.

Top Custom 404 Error Pages:

Some sites have gone out of their way to make their inevitable dead-ends look great. Below are some great examples and lists. Enjoy!

-21 Great 404 Error Pages
-Smash Magazines List of 404 Pages worth running into
-35 Entertaining 404 Pages
-17 ‘Cannot be Found’ Pages

Do you have examples of great 404 Error pages? Post them below and share the love!

Almost  2 years ago, Google announced Rich Snippets, making it possible to structure specific data to be displayed on Google’s search results pages.  It’s been getting a lot of love lately, because local search has become so important and Rich Snippets are very useful for geo-targetted search phrases, such as restaurants and product reviews. There are, however, several types of data that benefit from the use of Rich Snippets, these include:

• *Reviews

  *People

  *Products

  *Organizations

  *Recipes

  *Events

If your site contains information of these types, then you’ll want to include rich snippet code in your HTML. The code is pretty straightfoward, but can be entered using Microdata, Microformats or RDFa code. For this example, I’ll use Microdata rich snippets. Let’s say we want our products to show up in search results pages displaying an aggregate of the reviews left for the product, as well as the price and the item stock status. In the code, you’ll notice several new elements that call out specified data to be displayed in the search results.

Now let’s take a look at the actual properties within the code:

1. 1. 1. 1. itemprop=”itemreviewed“: identified the pizza restaurant name that is to show up, followed by the store photo
      2. 2. itemprop=”rating“: calls out for Google to display the ratings about the pizza restaurant
      3. 3. itemprop=”average” and itemprop=”best“: identifies the average rating, to be displayed with star icons
      4. 4. itemprop=”votes” and itemprop=”count“: relays the information about how many votes have been tallied to come up with the rating

As you can see, the code isn’t that difficult, it just requires the correct data being highlighted and clearly defined. Once you’ve added the code to your page, you can check it on Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool, where you can see exactly what your page will look like in search results.

Check out the Rich Snippets Testing  tool here

As an add-on to wordpress, it allows one to quickly create their own social site after a pretty simple install. They can build a community where members can create a blog, chat with other members, build a profile and much more. It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of ideas and destinations evolve from this new (and free, of course) tool.

Take a look- it doesn’t have everything one may want, but it’s a great step in an open directions.

1. Your site is a laboratory, not a sculpture. Sometimes we’ll have a client that wants their site, or a page to be 100% perfect before it goes live. Sometimes, this is also when their old page is either hideous and SEO and visual cryptonite, or it doesn’t even exist at all. I like to get the new page live as soon as possible, then tweak it as we go.

2. Calls to action. He emphasizes the importance of these on a page.

“Too often calls to action are hidden, by a loaded page with too many graphic elements, by appearing below the fold or by a bad design choice (too small, faint color, or a button that does not look like a button). By improving the call to action and making it prominent on the page, you can sometimes boost your conversion rates drastically”

3. Testing tools:

• Google Website Optimizer
• Amadesa
• SiteSpect
• Autonomy Optimost
• Omniture Test & Target

There are more good tips, but I like these three the best. It’s important to continually be trying to make each page reach it’s maximum potential.

Rand from SEOmoz recently posting about link value, highlighted one of the principles of search engines that makes this a good idea:

“As you’ve likely noticed, search engines have become more and more dependent on metrics about an entire domain, rather than just an individual page. It’s why you’ll see new pages or those with very few links ranking highly, simply because they’re on an important, trusted, well-linked-to domain. In the ranking factors survey, we called this “domain authority” and it accounted for the single largest chunk of the Google algorithm (in the aggregate of the voters’ opinions).”

I couldn’t agree more. Higher results are gained by creating a new page on the main site, rather than a separate micro-site. Branding  and financial issues aside, this is one of the biggest reasons we at TK cringe when we hear a client tell us a company wants to come in and create a bunch of micro-sites.

It’s been around for a bit, but we’re now using the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin. It’s a great addition, as it automatically notifies you when a link is broken on your blog or site.  I have it set up to check the site every 3 days, as you can easily have it check your site at set times. You can also manually check it at any time.  Pretty nice addition and super easy to use.

Enjoy!

Thanks SEOmoz, and Jen for another good installment.

Found a hot twitter plugin for wordpress. It’s called Twitter Tools and is a compilation of everything you need to keep your twitter updated with blog posts and blog updated with twitter posts. It’s my favorite so far. If you know of any other really good ones, I’d love to hear your suggestions.