SEO Blog

Every web surfer has encountered the dreaded 404 page not found error message.
The generic error page is horrible to look at and it does not encourage web visitors to explore more of your site.Imagine being able to setup a custom error message page that looked good, told the visitor what had gone wrong and then suggested some alternative links to other locations on your site, such as the home page, sitemap or even a search page.

If the visitor wanted to, they could then visit other parts of your site.It is very easy to setup a custom 404 error page (The 404 error is the error number returned when a page or directory is not found on your site). The easiest way to redirect visitors that encounter a 404 is to either send them to your sites home page or to your sitemap page We do this by placing a one line of code in your websites .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 /sitemap.html

This would redirect all 404 error messages to the sitemap page.

The path to the page you want to display, must already exist on your web server, otherwise the web server will tie itself up in a never ending loop.
The full path to the error page must be specified and it must be relative to the root path of that account (remember, placing a / at the front of a file name or directory specifies that it’s relative to the root directory).

To make a custom error page, simply create a page using your favorite webpage editor such as MS FrontPage or DreamWeaver. The page can contain anything you wish, such as images, links etc. Save the file as something easy to remember (such as 404errors.html)

I would then suggest you make a directory directly off your /public_html/ folder and call it “error” and place your error files in here.

This would now mean that your .htaccess command line would now look like:
Error Document 404 /error/404errors.html

Now whenever a 404 error was generated on your site, your custom error page will be displayed, and keep your web visitors happy.

In the upcoming article, I will expand on this idea, and show you how to you can receive an email notification that a 404 error has occurred on your site. It will tell you what caused the error, and the offending page. Allowing you to try and fix all broken links leading to your site.

UsabilityAccessibility and Usability issues

Since Googlebot is actually designed to simulate the behavior of an average Internet user, it will check web pages for accessibility and usability issues as well. In general, the algorithms identifying major problems of a web site are highly refined, thus errors, misused code or hard to comprehend layouts are all playing a role in deciding the ranking of the pages. While a few errors will most likely be ignored, major problems, site-wide navigational inconsistencies, and especially intentional misuse or even overuse of certain elements may very well lead to a decline in rankings.

Known issues

Accessibility and usability checks are heavily relying on browser compatibility, which in fact is an ever changing factor. Some practices may now be more widespread than they were about a year ago, yet still be viewed as a hindrance, because of a minority of web browsing software still can not display them correctly. Google is updating its algorithms and Googlebot constantly, thus is expanding the methods a web site may utilize in its design to get its content properly indexed. The results try to be on par with the majority and technical advancements. Shockwave Flash content is analyzed for its textual content, javascript based links are followed the same as anchor text links ( although they don’t pass any parameters ), image maps, information in the <NOFRAMES> tag, and other advancements in standards are evaluated in the same manner for relevance and trust. However the broader range of browsers a web site can serve, the more importance it will be given to. There is still a hierarchy in judging usability issues, rendering the most accessible sites above the specialized designs. For example, text link references will weigh more than image based links, references buried in heavy code will likely to be followed at a slower rate than easy to access navigation.

+ Resolution: The W3C standard for web pages is a good hint on whether web sites are ready to be evaluated by Googlebot, based on the simulated user experience. While a page does not need to comply with all standards, major errors, and problems that are not only browser specific differences will less likely be ignored. Asking yourself the question whether your web site is easy to use, and whether it is accessible with most common web browsers is also a hint. A simple checklist might be to watch out for broken links, orphaned pages, loading time, number of links within the navigation, and the overall navigation communicating a consistent and coherent page hierarchy, images being labeled with ALT tags, the use of unique TITLE and META description tags, proper page encoding settings, language settings, text of readable size and color, no hidden text, no overuse of anchor text in links, no cloaking or off-screen content, no invisible layers, no redirect chains, no overuse of keywords to an extent where the content becomes meaningless, use of all necessary but also closing of all HTML tags, use of proper layout emphasizing the parts unique to a page, and the code not relying on yet to become standard practices. While the list of things to keep an eye out for could seem long, once thought over, the knowledge of web page coding and some common sense applied will save most pages from becoming a burden to your web site, or the visitor trying to decipher them. The most common errors are still the most obvious ones, with misused or vital but forgotten HTML code leading the list of problems, and cause many of the instances of a drop in rankings.