404, three innocent little numbers that have entered the general lexicon of the English language because of the annoyance they bring to internet users. From an SEO perspective we have blogged about how to resolve these errors many times – by placing a 301 redirect on the URL that used to contain data to the new location. However, this is only half the story. What can you do about the 404 errors that are the result of either a human visitor or Robot getting the URL just plain wrong?

The tactics to deal with 404’s are quite well know, many sites either redirect the user to the homepage or display a custom page not found page with a choice of possibly pertinent pages. The worrying side of this trend is that many sites with this feature do not return the page as 404 error, instead they return an ok code to the webcrawler. This is not a catch 22 however, there is a way to avoid penalties for having a site seemingly full of 404 errors (this loses you ranking as it appears that the site is not finished, search engines will rarely admit that the site could be mis-indexed). In fact the solution is very simple; display your custom error page but make sure that the server returns a 404 code to the browser. That way the indexer (and user) will know that that URL does not exist, but will not stop the crawl of the site.

Part of SEO is the construction and development of a website that works with the search engines rather than against them. SEO Junkies is very well placed to perform this technical review of your website and advise you on necessary changes, or perform those changes ourselves!