Sometimes your website is like a kid. It doesn’t know or doesn’t care what it is throwing at its visitors.

Visitors come to your website looking for something, mostly through search engines. If you are lucky, it’s one of those first links they click from the search engine results. And if you are luckier still, they are looking for something really specific which is not around on any other website, but they found the headline of your post interesting. If your website throws a “Page Not found” error, chances of that visitor NOT coming back to your website anymore is quite high.

Why do you have Page Not Found errors in the first place? For one, you would have changed the link to your page – knowingly or unknowingly. This happens mostly in blogs if you change your permalink structure to make it more SE friendly, but the old link is indexed by the search engines (which is one reason to find a good permalink structure in the first place). Otherwise, you might have linked to another website’s page where your visitors would find more information; but that page moved. The first one is under your control, but the second one is not.

How to fix this?

There are two ways of looking at this. You can either find all those links and fix them, or you should give some related options to your users. A good website does both.

Using User-friendly 404 error pages

There may not be any such thing as the perfect user-friendly 404 error page. But there are some “404-must-haves” that would help your visitors still stay on your website. The crux of this is given below:

A sitemap link – Would make it easy for people to navigate further on your site. (Sitemap is a page of your site which would contain links to all the important pages and links to your website, organized neatly and easy to navigate).

A search box – Give an option for the users to search for what they want somewhere else in your website.

A distinctly minimalistic look – Lesser number of links and lesser the distractions, the better. The above two (sitemap and search) should give enough options for the user to check out things.

One more important thing that is not to be left out – let your user know that this is a 404 page. I mean, don’t put in all the big jargon about what a 404 is as this can really confuse your visitor (Microsoft’s standard 404 page is already annoying enough).

Ideally speaking, just telling the visitor that “The content you are looking for is not here or has been moved; but you can search for them in the search box below or check out one of the related pages in the sitemap” should be good enough. Once you have this part there, the rest of the task is to simply make it more appealing.

Smashing Magazine has a post about some sample 404 pages that will get you started.

Finding the reason for the 404 – and fixing it

Ok, so the damage is done, someone came to your website looking for something which does not exist. Not every time will the friendly error page save you. If your ship has a hole, what you do is find it and plug it before it causes more damage and sink it.

If your site is small, it’s fairly easy to find moved content or broken links. But this is not always the case when you have a lot of content and a good amount of subsequent traffic. There are some ways by which you can check these pages and close them or find alternatives.

Google Analytics – If you use Google Analytics on your website, then slightly modify the javascript of your Google Analytics code, and you can track the pages missing from your website using the same piece of code. You will get the URL of the missing page, as well as the referring site.

Google Webmaster tools – If you are not too sure about modifying your Javascript code, Google Webmaster tools can help. You will need to add and verify your website before you can start using it. Once you are all set, you can go to Dashboard -> Diagnostics -> Crawl Errors option and select the “Not Found” option to see your broken links. It will catch a good lot of the broken links on your website, though not all, but what your search engine visitors think is worth looking for.

Checking out your website logs – Most webhosts provide tools to their users to check the website logs. You must have seen AWStats if you use cPanel. Amongst a lot of other goodies, AWStats gives you a list of all your missing pages that was ever searched for on your site by someone. You can see it month-wise for the previous months as well, including from which page it was being referred to. You can see a sample below -