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. If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. 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. 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. Here’s the part of John’s post that probably interests you: The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog. We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. I thought I’d play hooky from a meeting and talk about how the newest version of the Toolbar handles 404 pages for users, because I see some people writing about it this morning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |