Error 404 Page: What is Error 404 Page?

Whenever the visitor to your site asks for a page that is not available on your site, the Error 404 "Page not found" message will be displayed. The 404 or Page Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code which indicates that the visitor was able to communicate with the server but the server could not find the page which was requested.

The default error 404 page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.

What Causes Error 404 Page:

There can be many reasons you will see error 404 pages. Some of them are given below.

Renaming pages: Sometimes when you have first created the website you would have named the page as internet_marketing_insights.html and after starting the Search engine optimization you would have renamed into internet-marketing-insights.html for search engine friendliness. If this is the case, please make sure that all these URL’s are redirected by 301 redirection to their respective URL’s.

Revamping the Site: You would have decided to revamp your site and convert the website from asp to aspx. Here also you can use 301 redirect.

Moving a page: Some of the webmasters, for whatever reason decides to reorganize their site. For example some medical supplies website first decides to keep ‘Fair & Lovely Cream’ under ‘Skin Care’ and now decides to place it in ‘Cosmetics’.

Mistyping by Visitors: Sometimes you are running an offline campaign and the user mistypes the URL in the browser, he will get the Error 404 page.

Back Links: Some of the back links to your site will be leading to your old URL’s which is no longer available. You can request the website owners to correct the URL linked to your site.

Internal links: Internal links in your website may be linked to incorrect URL’s. You can correct this by changing the linking URL’s in the code. For example; you would have linked to www.example.com/sem.html instead of www.example.com/marketing/sem.html.

Recent survey indicates that more than 75% of visitors who receives Error 404 Page never make a second attempt to find a missing page. We will be missing these visitors if we are not going to tackle this issue.

In my next post I will be explaining how to find the error 404 page in the website and how to customize error 404 page.