Traffic in error 404 pages

[grace.t]

Hi Guys,

I need some suggestions from you guys. How can I minimize the traffic from error 404 pages?

Thanks =)

[LukeBennett]

Create a re-direct on the to your normal homepage (or a non-400 page) this will 1. take them away from the 404 pages and 2. create more traffic on the page you re-direct to.

[videowall]

There are many online website who can check such broken links in your website. You can filter your website & get it corrected from there.

[LukeBennett]

I still think instead of ridding of them. if your getting such traffic from them then why not just redirect them to your main page so you get all that traffic?

[grace.t]

Thanks for your suggestions guys but I need better solutions. Actually I found an article about minimizing the traffic from the 404 error page.

It classifies the possible causes for a 404 Not Found error which are:

* Incorrect or outdated link on one or more of your pages
* Incorrect or outdated link to your site from another site
* Search engine index contains an outdated page
* Outdated user bookmark
* Visitor made error when manually entering a URL

Also I found out same solutions which is using a broken link checker program. Redirecting the 404 pages to main page is also a good idea.

Moreover, I found out that sources of the traffic of 404 pages are from search engines or referring sites.

Ho can I use a search engine to identify external pages which contain incorrect or outdated links of the website?

[laura_ci]

I believe if you sign up for Google Mastertools, you can get a lot of information about where your traffic comes from...which should include those who land on 404 pages. I've only played around with Google Mastertools a tiny bit so not too sure how good this function is.

There is also the issue that it takes a month to get you the first lump of data, so maybe not the most useful of tools from Google :-/

However you may be interested in this, apparently its also good practice to make your 404 page look like the rest of your site, and include some re-directs on it. So people don't get scared and run away.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/25/wanted-your-404-error-pages/

Hope your having luck getting to the bottom of your 404 problems.

- Laura

[grace.t]

Hi Guys,

I found this Xenu broken link checker
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.

What can you say about this software? Do you think it is useful programs? Or can you recommend me some broken link checker?

[grace.t]

I believe if you sign up for Google Mastertools, you can get a lot of information about where your traffic comes from...which should include those who land on 404 pages. I've only played around with Google Mastertools a tiny bit so not too sure how good this function is.

There is also the issue that it takes a month to get you the first lump of data, so maybe not the most useful of tools from Google :-/

- Laura

I'm using Google analytics to track the traffic sources of 404 pages. Most of them are from images.google.com. How can I correct the broken link from google? Please help me

[almostbob]

I'm using Google analytics to track the traffic sources of 404 pages. Most of them are from images.google.com. How can I correct the broken link from google?

resubmit your sitemap to google, to update all old links
tell google not to index images
use apache mod_rewrite to redirect all direct calls to images to the homepage.
put a sitesearch widget on the 404 page
put your site menu on the 404 page
put a "did you mean" widget on the 404 page
if you have protected the images, so they can only be accessed from your site, the google links will always fail, unprotect the images, but that allows bandwidth theft. have mod_rewrite replace all external calls to images with the attachment or similar

[grace.t]

resubmit your sitemap to google, to update all old links
tell google not to index images
use apache mod_rewrite to redirect all direct calls to images to the homepage.
if you have protected the images, so they can only be accessed from your site, the google links will always fail, unprotect the images, but that allows bandwidth theft. have mod_rewrite replace all external calls to images with the attachment or similar

That's a great idea but I do not know how to do it. I need you to share your knowledge with me. :) How can I resubmit sitemap to google to update old links? How can I tell google not to index images? Can you gave sample codes of mod_rewrite which can redirect all images to the certain page?

Thank you :)

[almostbob]

get a google webmaster tools account,
Follow all the directions
I get my sitemaps made from the sitemap tool at http://www.auditmypc.com/
Google have a good set of howtos to tell google how to index your site called webmaster 101

this code in your .htaccess file redirects external sites accessing images

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?MYSITE\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

The <file></file> block prevents anyone reading your .htaccess file
the second block protects images being accessed from offsite

[grace.t]

Thank you so much Almostbob. :) I'll try this code