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Every site has them, every site owner hates them and seeing a 404 error page in your log files means that there something wrong on your site. Knowing there is a problem is one thing, being able to locate and fix that problem Is a different story.

404 error pages are not always a bad thing and I will talk about what you can do with 404 pages shortly, but first I think it is important to understand why they are there, what causes them and how to avoid a repeat of these problems in the future.

If a visitor has gotten to a 404 error page, it means that they have taken a wrong turn somewhere either on their own or they followed a broken link, the majority of the time this is down to human error. A broken link has been added to the page, these are easy to fix, just find the page the link is on and fix it.

If you are running a site on a content management system the problems could go a lot deeper especially when the pages are created dynamically. Let’s say you have a web shop with a couple  of thousand pages and one day you decided to rename a category ( bad idea) all of the pages that are associated with that category may now reside on a different URL. Not only will this play havoc with your rankings, but any links that were bookmarked or stored for later use will now most probably lead to your 404 page. There are ways around this issue like redirects but in most cases considering the time and effort involved it may be best to leave you URL structure alone. If you have to go down this road and redirects are your only options you will need to try and funnel the page rank from the old pages to the new. Implementing a 301 redirect will help to preserve some of the juice. This method should only be considered in the most extreme cases and not a decision that you should take lightly.

Using 404 error pages to your advantage

It’s inevitable that a searcher will find your 404 error pages sooner or later, but can you use this as an opportunity?  Even if you choose to display a list of your most popular posts this can help to get your visitors back on track. Taking this idea a little further why not offer them a special prize for finding your hidden page!, or a discount on their next purchase. I have also tested these pages using a QR code linked to a special promotion which worked well. The one word of caution I would suggest here is that if anybody thinks they have found a loop hole they will try and exploit it, limiting these special promotions to 1 per account will just mean that searcher will set up another account.

How to deal with error pages

When trying to tackle your error pages your first task will be to locate where the root of the problems lie. You could spend hours trawling through your site to try and find the problem or you could use Google Analytics to track these events for you. Google provide a special snippet of code that you can add to these pages which will track anyone that hit your 404 page it will also tell you which page the issue are on. Doing it this way means you are letting your searchers find the issues for you.

Redirecting your error pages back to your home page is not something I would normally recommend as in most circumstances it will only confuse the visitor and if you are tracking your click paths you may find a lot of bounce around between these pages. Adding redirects also makes it more difficult to track and fix these issues.

Most webmaster get a cold flush when the see an error page show up on their server logs but it is always better to know you have an issue so you can fix it rather than having an issue that could be effective the success of your site.

This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Datalogic Memor and the Symbol MC70. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.