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SEO Compass: Site Map and 404 Error Pages
May 15, 2005 By Webposition SEO Team
By Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media Inc.
These days, it’s much easier to get lost in search engines, than to be found. As the Web grows and evolves, many sites are redesigned, leaving orphaned or “dead pages” in their wake. While site visitors appreciate improved content and features a new site can offer, they get frustrated by clicking through to blank white 404 error pages on the old site. Building a custom 404 error page is an elegant solution to this problem.
Mapping it Out
Before we go into too much detail on 404 error pages, let’s take a brief detour into the world of site maps. If you don’t have a site map on your Web site, you need one. It’s simply a visual outline of primary, secondary, and tertiary pages within your site. Some site visitors appreciate visual navigation as a quick way to assess the overall size and structure of a Web site and get to the information they want within one or two clicks. Additionally, you should ensure the integrity of your site’s link structure. This can be easily done through software applications like Link Defender that can automatically verify the integrity of your web site’s links including image, FTP, and dynamic links.
Intentional Errors
Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of a site map, we can get back to the topic at hand: custom 404 error pages. As described earlier, a standard 404 error page is a blank white page that says “The page cannot be found.” While the fine print suggests visiting the home page of the URL in question, visitors often find it easier to click the back button to return to the search results and visit another site (like your competitors).
The best way to capture visitors from dead pages still visible in search results is to create a custom 404 error page that looks like your Web site template. It should have your logo and navigation, and in the main content area, it should say something like, “We’re sorry this page is not available, please visit the links below to find what you are looking for.” The “links” that follow would be content from the existing site map. Now a visitor is able to locate what they are looking for rather than leaving.
Once you’ve developed your site map, use that as a baseline to build a custom 404 error page. Since you’ve already submitted the site map to search engines to ensure all current pages are indexed, you don’t need to do anything more but sit back and watch your traffic increase (using WebTrends of course). Once the spider is served a 404 error page instead of a dead link, two things happen: the current listing maintains position longer and the spider is directed to the current pages, improving overall visibility.
In the end, creating a custom 404 error page based on the site map allows you to retain current search engine visibility while driving lost traffic to the appropriate areas of the site and improving overall site conversion. For more information, check out the resources below.
Resources
* HighRankings.com
* Search Engine Watch
* SEO Chat
* W3 Organization
Google Updates Toolbar PageRank for Many Pages
By Webposition SEO Team
Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | May 2005
Around the 22nd of April, Google implemented a long overdue large-scale update of the toolbar PageRank for many sites. You might want to check your PageRank to see if you were affected. Google’s backlinks feature (the number of incoming links to your site Google shows when you do a link:www.yoursite.com command) was also updated.
While many sites saw a nice PageRank increase of one or two points, a fair number of heavily over-optimized sites actually saw their PageRank drop significantly, in some cases all the way to PR=0 (zero). This result was largely due to Google’s much more aggressive detection of what it sees as artificial links structures.
While it’s nice (and a bit of an ego boost) to see your PageRank go up, keep in mind that toolbar PageRank is only a very general indicator of how well your site is going to rank for a given keyword. There are many other factors involved and the site with the highest PageRank does not necessarily always rank the highest.
The point is to not get too caught up in obsessing over your site’s PageRank. In general, sites with a higher PageRank will rank better, but not always – and Google itself has said that toolbar PageRank differs from the actual PageRank Google uses to rank a site.
However, should one of your pages that previously enjoyed high PR suddenly drop to PR=0, then THAT can spell trouble – and likely indicates that the page has been assessed a serious penalty for violating one of Google’s guidelines.
The above article is reprinted with permission from Planet Ocean’s SearchEngineNews.com, copyright 2005, and distributed with permission by WebTrends maker of WebPosition, the award-winning software that helps track and improve your search engine rankings. You may download a FREE trial copy of WebPosition from: http://www.webposition.com/trial/
Google Limits Link Popularity Searches?
By Webposition SEO Team
Some Google searchers have been noticing a new limitation when checking link popularity using the “link:” command. If you perform too many of these searches within a certain period of time, a page is returned claiming that your computer has spyware installed on it and requires a code to be entered on the page before the search results will be returned.
The message can be a bit misleading: in most cases, spyware has nothing to do with it. The problem? Too many link popularity searches were performed in too short of time period from your computer. The limit is usually imposed for only a few hours.
Link popularity searches on Google take the form of link:www.domainname.com, and when used, return the number of sites within the Google index that link to whatever domain you are querying about. It’s a useful feature to measure trends over time, but most agree that the results are filtered and not representative of the actual number of links for a given domain.
Reports suggest that the amount of link queries allowed usually run into the hundreds, and only when the requests are sent at a fairly rapid rate.
WebPosition uses the link popularity searches very sparingly, so it should never be a cause for this block being placed. WebPosition recommends users always use best practices in their SEO efforts.
For more information about this feature, see the section “Who Links To You?” at the bottom of the Google Web Search Features page.