“Error 404 – Page not found”: this error is so common that it has even inspired countless memes today. To know how to fix the 404 not found error and understand how it affects the best SEO agency in Dubai , we must know what it is exactly.
In this article, we will show you how to solve the 404 not found error, its causes, and its influence on the ranking of your page in search engines.
404 errors can occur for multiple reasons. Some of the most common are the following:
- The link structure of your website can be changed using your permalink. (This mainly happens when changing the layout or when changing the permalinks.)
- You removed the content from your website.
- Someone linked your website to a misspelled link or otherwise a wrong link.
When a search engine user or bot requests access to the wrong page on a server, web servers generally respond with an HTTP status code of 404, to tell the user that the page does not exist on the server .
How to fix 404 not found error?
Let’s see what you can do with 404 error pages and how to deal with them to your advantage.
Step one: find 404 links.
First, we need to identify any 404 pages on your blog. The best place to start is with the Google Webmaster tool (also known as the Google search console).
Step two: fix 404 errors for users
Once you have a list of 404 pages for your domain, here are several solutions to handle them:
- Redirect the 301 link to the most relevant post / article or category. If there is no relevant article or category, go to the next step.
- If the error arises due to a misspelled link from another domain, you can ask the webmaster to update the link, or use the 301 redirect.
- If there is no relevant article on your website related to the 404 link, just leave it. Google will automatically stop indexing such pages eventually.
- You can also manually unsubscribe such pages from the web index using the webmaster removal tool . However, if you have thousands of such pages, it will be a big task for you. Then I would suggest the option above or the next.
- In order to spice up your page, use a custom 404 page. You can add a search box, display articles relevant to the user’s search query, or display some of the most popular articles on your portal. The idea is to provide a good user experience.
You can join SEO Forum as well for better guidance on that.
How does the 404 not found error affect SEO?
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have a website www.digitalmarketing.ae with thousands of 404 pages, you don’t want search engine bots to waste their limited crawling resources on those pages.
Using the Google webmaster tool, it is best to redirect whenever possible or block bots from accessing these pages using Robots.txt and remove them. This is ideal especially when you have removed any tag directory or category / page from your portal.
404 pages are not enemies of an SEO expert, but it is not a good idea to have a long list of them on your blog. The poor user experience they create is the main concern with the 404 pages.
With search engine optimization, delivering a good user experience, this is an issue to make an effort.