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April 08, 2009
Depressed Server, Great 404 Link Bait / Viral Marketing Example
By Scott Goodyear
If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or if you've seen the movie, you know that Marvin The Paranoid Android is funny in it's own depressing way. What if your web server had the same dejected outlook? Check out this 404 error page. This is a great example of something that can go "viral" and add new visitors, links, and attention to a site.
Every time some one hits the wrong URL or mistypes when visiting the Wikimaniacs site, they come across this great 404 page. While it is probably a rare occurrence to hit this page, if the site lasts a few years, it wouldn't surprise me to see their 404 page submitted to the various social bookmark sites over and over again as visitors re-"discover" this 404 page. This is one of the ways in which viral marketing works best... The reason why I found this page? It hit the front page of a social bookmark site called "Reddit".
It could be that some one associated with Wikimaniacs submitted the page to Reddit, or that with their recent brush with popularity via social bookmark site Digg, a new visitor came across this error page, loved it, and subsequently decided to submit an error URL to Reddit (and perhaps other places as well). Either way, it helps them to gain more visibility and potentially improve their rankings. As I mentioned a few months ago, a 360 degree take on visitor experience and attention to little details like 404 pages can be quite positive toward marketing a site.
(Photo by Prince Heathen)
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