How To Fix 404 Errors?

Dear readers, as a webmaster I suggest you do not allow any 404 error pages stay with your site. It affects your site health. Probably it causes traffic lose.  404 errors occurred when leave the deleted or removed pages lonely.  Preserve your site health, use 301 redirection method. Do not link any 404 error pages from your website.

Steps to find 404 error pages

1. Go to your webmasters tool
2. Choose the site which needs to fix 404 errors
3. Click crawl errors which one comes under to crawl
   
4. Click download button and choose the file format to get the 404 errors list

Use 301 redirection to resolve 404 errors

Finalize the error pages which should be possible to redirect. After filtering the error pages use the following tag to redirect the pages. The event is processing when the users click your deleted pages through other sources.

HTACCESS redirect

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm

New/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

PHP Redirect

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end 

Use Google webmaster tool to decrease the 404 counts

1. Go to the same page where you download the 404 errors list in Google webmaster tools.
2. Select the error pages which are fixed by you.
3. Click mark as fixed. Within few days the graph should be go down. If you have any trouble in finding the error pages use the filter option.

Create Custom 404 error page

Sometime users are misspelled the URL. The page goes to 404 errors. At that time more chances you have to lose the users. Create custom 404 error page and give some important links in the page. Surely the custom 404 error pages should be help for this kind of issue.

Posted By

Susanna Michale

Thanks for reading my post. This is Susanna Michale basically from United Kingdom. I likes to participate as blogger in the web sites related to application development, technology, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and mobiles. I have a responsibility role to work as senior software engineer in agriya, a leading clone scripts developer worldwide. Follow on Google+ Susanna Michale