decreasing 404 page errors

5urlcom — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 18:53:56 +0000

Thank you Brian Farkas for understanding my suggestion.

The example that I had offered was due to personal testings of two web sites that each receive about 500 unique visitors daily, and are in the top 10 in every major search engine for several popular keyphrases.

I compared my 404 page errors before and after. They improved significantly! Also, I placed a tracker on one page to verify it's results. My search engine rankings did not change. This is different from "Doorway" pages.

However, for some clients of mine who INSISTED on a flash into, I did link to a doorway page, and noticed improvements in search engine referrals.

Suzanne — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 04:43:52 +0000

If it's a search engine spider, then having multiple pages of the same content will be more likely to get you banned from the search engine, or confuse readers with multiple entries for what appears to be the same thing.

Of course, some marketers swear by these doorway or bridge pages, but search engines are evolving to eliminate them.

Suzanne

Brian Farkas — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 03:02:15 +0000

I believe he's talking about the 404 errors that are generated by search engine spiders... So they wouldn't really be apparent to anyone other than the site owner (in the logs). He's saying that if a user names their home page default.html, apache will first look for index.html, index.htm, etc... Although I'm not sure whether or not this alone will generate 404's.

Brian

Suzanne — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 00:35:54 +0000

What the heck are you talking about?

Apache checks for the pages, stopping when it finds one. However you can set it at the server level (or with DirectoryIndex with .htaccess) to look for a particular page.

Having a customized 404 page would be even better than your suggestion, especially if you put your site index or sitemap on the 404 page so that people can find what they are looking for without having to resort to a search engine or hacking the url.

The only time you would get errors for other index pages is if people are guessing the url. If that's the case (people guess index.htm? home.htm?), a custom 404 is far better than duplicated pages as far as development and user feedback (feedback to the user that helps them) goes.

Suzanne