Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Your visitors may stumble into a 404
"Not found"
page on your website for a variety of reasons:
- A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake
- Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message
- Moved or deleted content
Confronted by a 404
page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click
the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an earlier post
for " 404
week at Webmaster Central"
,
there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to
make 404
pages more useful, we've just added a section in Webmaster Tools
called "Enhance 404
pages". If you've created a custom 404
page
this allows you to embed a widget in your 404
page that helps your visitors find what
they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL.
Example: Jamie receives the link www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html
in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to www.example.com/activities/adventur
. As a result it returns a 404
page.
With the 404
widget added, however, she could instead see the following:
In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404
widget also suggests the
following, if available:
- a link to the parent subdirectory
- a sitemap webpage
- site search query suggestions and search box
How do you add the widget? Visit the "Enhance 404
pages" section in Webmaster Tools,
which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your
custom 404
page's code. As always, don't forget to return a proper 404
code
.
Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the
CSS block that we've included. For more information, check out our guide on how to customize the look of your 404
widget
.
This feature is currently experimental—we might not provide corrections and suggestions for your site but we'll be working to improve the coverage. In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments below or in our group discussion . Thanks for helping us make the Internet a more friendly place!
