How to Optimize Custom 404 page – Best Practices

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All of us have encountered a 404 error on the site and such a page wanted to leave as soon as possible. But some companies, online stores, and media create pages with a 404 response from the server, which you immediately add to your bookmarks.

Let me tell you how to achieve this effect and make the most out of a 404 page.

Is a 404 Error Bad for SEO?
404 Not Found is a server response code that informs you that the page cannot be found at the specified address.

There is an opinion that the presence of pages with 404 sweden number dataset on the site has a negative impact on SEO, but in fact, this is not entirely true.

From Google Help:


In general, 404 errors won’t impact your site’s search performance, and you can safely ignore them if you’re certain that the URLs should not exist on your site. They could be caused by someone making a typo when linking to you, some type of misconfiguration (if the links are automatically generated, for example, by a CMS), or by Google’s increased efforts to recognize and crawl links embedded in JavaScript or other embedded content.

The appearance of 404 errors on the site is an unavoidable situation, and the reasons for this may be different:

changes in the site structure;
broken links;
URL changes;
page or site no longer exists.
These causes require careful research – it is necessary to replace broken links with the actual links, and to set up 301 redirects to the actual pages when changing the structure and URLs of the site.

Dive into our glossary for key SEO definitions to boost your expertise!

However, there are also quite ordinary situations when 404 pages appear. For example:

a typo when a user enters a URL;
removing products from the site.
In these cases, the appearance of a 404 page is inevitable and logical for search robots. Let’s look at how to optimize 404 pages for the site.

In each case, you need to create a template and configure a 404 server response code for non-existent pages. At the same time, follow the rules that help SEO:

The 404 page must be configured correctly and return an HTTP 404 (Not Found) code to keep it out of the search engine index. First of all, such pages will be considered duplicates. Secondly, it may have a negative impact on behavioral factors. If a person from the search gets on the 404 page – he obviously would be upset because he was expecting to see something completely different. Consequently, he will quickly leave your site and go back to the search.
It is not recommended to do a 301 redirect to the home page. This way you confuse the user: he was expecting to get one page, and in an unknown way he ended up on the home page. There should be a link to the home page from the 404 page, but not a redirect.