Ever accidentally mistype a URL for a website and found yourself staring at the wonderful brick wall that is a 404 Page Not Found error? Have you ever removed a part of your website and wondered how you need to let the search engines know that those pages have been removed? Have you ever wondered “Hey, 404 and 301 are really cool numbers, I wonder what they do for us on the internet?!” ? Custom error documents like 404 & 301 are the keys to preventing these things from hurting a web users experience and the SEO for web administrators.

Custom error documents are many, but today we will focus mainly on the 404 and 301 documents. A 404 is an error document that informs the browser or web spider that the page is no longer there. There are a few different ways that it can be done. IIS has a standard built in page that is kinda ugly and uninformative. Or you can create your own. It is recommended that you include all your normal header and footer information as well as navigation and site map.

rent a car bulgaria301 error documents are permanent redirects. Basically they tell people and SEO bots that the page doesn’t exist and redirects to the proper url. So if your in your browser of choice and type delaware.net you would get redirected to www.delaware.net. This helps web administrators make sure that their websites are found properly and allows web users a little bit of flexibility in how they surf. Typing www over and over again would get annoying.

So what does all of this mean to you? A cleaner web experience for users and better search engine results for web administrators. Stay tuned for our next installment where we show you how to create these custom error documents within both apache and IIS.