Member Avatar for RachEv

A 404 error page is shown to you user if they looking for a page on your site that does not exist. So instead of using the default page you can create a custom one. This can improve your SEO if you redirect people to your homepage.

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Good thread — useful starter points from , and . A custom 404 helps real users stay on site, but the SEO benefit depends on correct server behavior and follow-up action. The single most common mistake is turning every missing URL into a homepage redirect or a friendly page that actually returns HTTP 200; search engines treat those as "soft 404s" and they do not preserve link value. For authoritative guidance on status codes and how Google handles them, see .

Practical checklist:

  • Make the page friendly and useful: brief explanation, prominent site search, top categories, contact/report link and links to likely replacements.
  • Always return the correct status: 404 for temporarily missing, 410 for permanently removed, and 301 for moved content you want indexed under a new URL.
  • Log and monitor 404s (server logs, Google Search Console Coverage, analytics) and create 301 redirects for high-value broken URLs rather than leaving them in place.
  • Avoid meta-refresh or JavaScript redirects from missing pages; they confuse crawlers.

Quick server examples (keep the page content friendly while preserving the proper status):

# Apache (.htaccess or httpd.conf)
ErrorDocument 404 /error-pages/404.html
# nginx
error_page 404 /404.html;
location = /404.html { internal; root /usr/share/nginx/html; }

Troubleshooting tip: verify the response code with a HEAD request, for example curl -I https://example.com/nonexistent. If the page returns 200, fix server config or the ErrorDocument/ error_page handling. For more on design and SEO considerations for 404s, see and the Apache docs on custom error pages.

Member Avatar for Josephm

It helps to not to lost your visitors..If they are on any broken or wrong link then 404 error page help you to get visitor on the correct website

Member Avatar for claydcousta

New functionality to display detailed error page containing information needed to troubleshoot an error - by default, requests from local host get the detailed error page and only remote requests get the custom error page that you have configured, to change this, you have to change the error Mode attribute in system.

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