Many of us webmasters don’t take time or just don’t think about setting up a custom 404 page but it seems that its much more important to setup your own custom 404 pages to avoid any missed affiliate sales, pages, or products or simply loosing your visitors to Google or someone else. It is also good Search engine Optimization practice to have your own custom 404 page.

And now it is confirmed that the new Google Toolbar Beta officially hijacks your web browser when you go to a page that no longer exists and returns a 404 “Not Found” error. Matt Cutts and TechCrunch in their article confirmed the story.

From Matt Cutts:

404 errors with default error pages

When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So this definitely means that it is very important to setup your own custom 404 pages and here’s some “must haves”:

WordPress themes already have 404 page template but you should simply add some more text like “something went wrong” or “That Page is Currently Unavailable” and add a link to the homepage and sitemap (if you have one) as this is the easiest way for your users to get out of the situation.

If you have a site search box. If you don’t have a site search and are your site is generating 404 errors frequently, perhaps you should get one. You can even put one from Google that will search your site and the web.

You should avoid putting all your standard site navigation on this page as you should aim to remove any distractions. In wordpress 404 page template just remove script that includes sidebar (<?php get_sidebar(); ?>).

Anything extra you add to your 404 page (besides standard”Page Not Found”) it just might help keeping your visitor on your site longer and possibly not lose that sale after all.

Here’s a good example of 404 page from Alistapart.com : Click Here!

Related links

• Creating a Custom 404 Error Page (4 Guys From Rolla)
• Creating Custom Error Messages in Apache (4WebHelp)

Do you support Google’s stance in hijacking pages? What do you think?