404 Error News
I’ve been reading a lot of buzz lately on various SEO blogs about 404 errors. In case you haven’t heard, many SEO news sources are pointing to a recent webmaster help thread where Googler “JohnMu” states that having a large number of 404 errors on your site “doesn’t hurt you”. I thought it was imperative to clarify some misinterpretations of this news, especially by beginners. What I’m afraid of is people reading this news and simply not paying attention to 404 errors on their site. By themselves 404 errors “don’t hurt you”, this is absolutely true. It is important, however, to understand how 404 errors effect your site and how you can monitor them to actually improve SEO performance. Yes, you heard correct…improve your SEO.
404 error pages are an excellent way to improve the usability of your site. When visitors click through external links to pages on your site that don’t exist or come as direct traffic to pages they think exist, they receive a 404 error. The most important consideration for usability is using a 404 error page to control bounce rates. The last thing you want to happen in your conversion funnel is for the user to bounce off to another site. Messaging on the 404 error page is key. You want to make sure to include relevant information about your site. It also helps to provide a solution to the not found error. This can be done by creating links to popular sections on your site etc…
Now that we’ve got the usability issue out of the way, let’s talk search engine crawlers and SEO impact. You do want to improve your SEO performance, right?
We know via “JohnMu” at Google that large numbers of 404 error pages will not hurt your rankings. Let’s not focus on the negative. How can you use 404 errors to actually improve your SEO? The key is capitalizing on external links pointing to 404 pages on your site. Now why would an external site link to a page that doesn’t exist? This usually happens when you change URLs without properly setting up 301 redirects. This is very common on E-commerce sites that change product URLs. It also happens on blogs. The other day I was creating a post and decided after I published it to change the URL to help rank for some additional long tail keywords I had forgotten about. I tweeted out my post and submitted it to digg, propeller, mybloglog, etc… Those services and people who found my article on those services where seeing the old URL. If a proper redirect wasn’t in place, there could have been tons of great external links pointing to a URL that had been changed. OK, OK…that didn’t happen to me, but it does occur more frequently than you would think. 
In order to capitalize on these 404 error pages and the links pointing to them (don’t forget internal links too), we need to find which pages are returning a 404 error messages that have link some link juice. Luckily for you, you don’t have to download a special program or click an affiliate link of mine. Google Webmaster Tools can give you all the insights you need to take advantage of this wasted SEO value. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Tools account you show create one. It is very simple and provide tons of additional benefits which I won’t bore people with in this post.
404 error link examples
Notice above that Google Webmaster Tools will tell you which pages are returning a 404 error as well as the number of links pointing to that URL. The number of links shown on the right represents all of the wasted link juice you are about to capitalize on. This screenshot is of a client who recently relaunched a new version of their site only a few days ago. I’m sure if your smart you can figure out the site. If you do, please keep it to yourself. As you can see some pages only have a few links pointing to them but the last link has 100 links whose value is being wasted!
In order to take advantage of these links, all you have to do is set up a permanent 301 redirect on these pages to relevant pages on your site. It order to get the most bang for your buck, redirect pages to a relevant deep page. If none exists, simply redirect the page to your canonical home page.
Now go forth and capitalize on some links you didn’t even know you had!
If you have any questions about the above post, please leave a comment below, send me an @seolair on twitter, or email me at webmaster at seolair dot com.
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I enjoyed your post but you could start using a few social sharing links I’ve seen all over the place, this way I really could email this article to my buddys