Website 404 Errors | Prevent Page Not Found Errors

404 Errors are more common than any other status code other than a http 200 OK code. This occurs when a page on the website is no longer found at the location of the URL. This is a critical no no for websites that are to perform well as websites with multiple broken links can suffer performance and ranking declines in Google.

A search engines goal is to return the most relevant results to the users search query. A search engine will devalue a website that provides multiple broken links because it will be considered an unreliable resource.

Search engines base their results on quality and consistency, if a website has frequent 404 errors there is no guarantee that the pages are going to be available if requested from a high position. Many websites over a period of time will encounter 404 errors that can be generated for a variety of reasons from server issues to website migration issues.

Websites that identify and resolve these issues quickly will not suffer the effects of traffic loss or ranking decline.

It is imperative to maintain a good linking profile within a website, and in order to do this, it's important to check that the links within your website are correct and not returning 404 errors.

A good tool to use to prevent or monitor errors is Google webmaster central, which can automatically report 404 errors that have been encountered. Resolving these issues as they occur is a great way to be counterproductive.

404 errors can be customised by a custom 404 page, providing the server settings are correct. Some websites have custom 404 pages that direct the user to the next most relevant page, or offer navigational options to other parts of the website. This is a great idea to prevent any loss of rankings or site performance as a result.

So, either setup Google webmasters central or run a site crawling tool to identify broken links, we recommend a link sleuth such as XENU which can be downloaded from download.com.