Search engines and custom 404 error pages

.htaccess and search engines - Custom 404 error pages

It’s not good for spiders or human visitors to reach  dead-end on your site.  Missing pages, or pages that have been moved or renamed can mean loss in spider ranking, as well as lost visitors t the site.  In the root directory of your website is a file called “.htaccess”, and note that it begins with a dot(.).  If this file does not exist, you may create it with any plain text editor.  Among other uses for .htaccess, a website contain custom redirection for error codes.  Instead of a page that displays nothing but the error code, and no links to continue navigation, use of these error code redirections will direct visitors to replacement, or known working parts of the site.

This is just as important for spiders on the site as for human visitors.  A site with properly used redirection for error 404 (file not found), for example, won’t appear to have a dead link, even though redirection may seem to be redundant.  That is, it is better to be sent back to the top of the page than to be sent into a dead-end.  Search engines look for sites that are easy to navigate, and short on dead-ends.  Among many other factors, the ease of navigation is a contributing influence to a site’s ranking.

.htaccess contains directives to how the site is handled by servers.  Telling the server to display a specific file for access violations gives you the chance to redirect someone to a sign-up page, for instance.  For bots, .htaccess is the preferred method of redirection, as such commands are considered more secure at the server level than from within a web page.  A new .htaccess file may be placed in each directory of the server, and lack of having one will fall back to the first parent directory which does supply the necessary information.  In this way, the golf clubs page can have a redirection to one place, but the football page may fall back to a general sports redirection.

404 Redirect example in .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /404-error-page.html
An excellent source for information on .htaccess redirection is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess2.shtml

Also, Apache maintains a complete .htaccess reference at: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html

Article written by SEOnotepad.com