How to Deal with Your 404 Page Errors

There is no doubt that 404 page errors are unavoidable, and it is going to happen, no matter how well you constructed your website. In this blog post, I will explain a few reasons why you will get 404 page errors and some reasons why you need to address it.

#1: The end user typed an incorrect URL into their Internet browser.
#2: They clicked on a link that has been deleted or moved to another location.
#3: Double slashes, triple slashes found in the URL.

Overall, 404 errors aren’t healthy and could actually indicate that you have some on going unnoticed issues. Try to keep your 404 page errors to a minimum, and you should address the issue if there is an unusual amount of them. It is recommended that when 404 errors that occur because of typos and incorrect URL, that you provide the end user with a customize 404 error page. Providing the end user with a customize error page will give them some options to keep them longer on your site, before they leave.

You will find out that here are a quite a few WordPress plugins that deal with 404 page error problems. However, I am going to list a few of my favorites that I feel are the most effective.

* Smart 404
When using the Smart 404 plugin, if a page can’t be found, it will make an effort to find a matching page and redirect it to the user. The plugin also supplies template tags that will provide a list of alternate suggestions and displays on the 404 page if there are no matches found.

* 404 Notifier
If you have moved some of your posts around on your WordPress blog, you could have overlooked some redirects that will end up as  broken URLs. This plugin will help to catch broken URLs so you can fix them.

* AskApache Google 404
The AskApache Google 404 plugin is a unique WordPress plugin that handles HTTP Errors exceptionally well. The most common one is the 404 page error, that occurs when a page can’t be found.

Additional comments:
I found that after installing the 404 notifier plugin, I was getting many 404 page errors due to double slashes in the URLs. I did a little research and found this code on “My Digital Life” to put into the .htaccess file to fix the issue.

# Remove multiple slashes anywhere in URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

or

# Remove multiple slashes after domain
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

- Replace your Domain name according. -

Furthermore, it is said that 404 page errors can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings in Google. Since their goal is to provide the end user with the best overall experience, sites that serve up excessive amounts of 404 errors, could find themselves losing their ranking positions.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, “How to Deal with Your 404 Page Errors“

Spunky Jones.