404 page errors typically occur through lack of maintenance. It’s a very common error and also very preventable. Most of the time these errors occur due to dead external links, so its matter of the webmaster regularly checking his or her external links, either manually or through the many automated solutions that exist.

The same degree of maintenance needs to be carried out on your own site from time to time, especially if your site is based on static URL’s. Dynamic url’s often generated through CMS style software packages often have the advantage of dynamically reassigning a link throughout the site, if it’s a case of simply name change, or category changes. If a page is deleted however, and the link is hard-coded, then dynamic sites can represent an even greater hassle than static ones.

Also keep in mind that from an SEO perspective, dynamic url’s that assign special characters to the url are not desirable in the first place, and really need to optimized and filtered, through libraries like mod-rewrite for example on the Apache server. Quite often this optimization is built into the software.

Broken internal links look very unprofessional, because it’s seen as something within the webmasters control. Quite often your visitors are non technical in nature and have no idea what a 404 page error is. They simply know it’s not what they wanted, and either head out of the site altogether or head back to the main index.

If you do wholesale, sweeping, changes to the hierarchy and architecture of your site, it can be a good idea to use redirects from the old page to the new page, or back to the main index.

Ideally, you should create a customized 404 error page that springs into action every time a user stumbles upon a 404 error. A customized error page should tell the user what page there on, what may have caused error, and where they can go to find the information they need – even if that information now resides on another site, and not your own.

In terms of design, a 404 page should mimic the rest of your site design, complete with logo, and at least a link back to your main index. If possibly it’s a good idea to provide the user with the full sitemap so they can quickly navigate back to there point of interest or something else that strikes there fancy. Also include a site search area.

Once you have designed your customized error page, its time to put that page to work.

Create or edit your .htaccess file, and add:

With “filename.html” being your customized page. If you do not have direct access to your .htaccess file, or some way of having one implemented by your host, then its time to switch hosts. The power of the .htaccess file is way beyond mere redirects, and you need access to it.

Having a customized 404 page might not be the ideal solution, prevention always being a better idea, but sometimes errors can’t be helped, especially when it comes to external links. At the very least a customized page has a good chance of stopping your visitor from leaving your site and going elsewhere.