Make your 404 pages more useful
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 10:13 AM

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 ortruncated 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.

Read the whole story!

Once again, Google is making life easier for Webmasters (and aspiring ones!). Do you have a custom 404 Page? If not, what are you waiting for? This simple tool is a great way to funnel mistaken visitors to a page you definitely want them to see!

--

Private Reply to Susan McCool