Warning: 404 Errors Lose You Business

Imagine your small business has a potential customer doing a search on Google for a product or service that you offer. Your website comes up in the search listing [preferably on page one] and with one click your future sale, or chance to build a relationship fails.

Why? Because you have a 404 error page.

What the visitor finds at the end of their click is a page telling them there has been an error, file not found – sadly, what they were looking for doesn’t exist any longer on the site they landed on.

Most small business owners don’t know if their site even has any 404 errors, or how to prevent them, so let’s go over how to stop these pesky numbered dead ends from losing your much welcomed visitors.

How did I get an error page on my site?!

Your hosting server creates a “file not found” or 404 error page automatically. 404 errors happen when the web address that is listed by the search engines no longer exists. This can be due to a site move, folders and their contents moving, a site linking to you has a typo within their link, or that the page was renamed to something more SEO friendly – for example, the original page name was fysn12gh.aspx and now it is small-business-owners-FAQ.html.

But whatever the reason, the search engines don’t know of the change, or re-routing the old address to the new one via your server is not occurring.

So what can a small business do to make sure that their web content is always being found?

The easiest way with Google is to sign up to use Google Webmaster Tools and let Google know that your website has an XML site map. That way the search engine will know what pages you want indexed on your site. You can also see which pages The Big G has indexed already and make quick changes, like removing them from the index altogether.

For other search engines the easiest way to prevent 404 errors is to go into your hosting control panel and do a 301 permanent redirect to the new page you want indexed. You simply state the original URL of your page and then chose for it to be redirected to a new URL. Seamlessly after clicking on the old link at Yahoo, Bing etc, the visitor will arrive at the new link.

This redirecting can be a real pain if your website is big, or if you simply changed formats – say went from a static HTML site to a dynamic Content Management System with different URL structuring.

But it is worth it.

Why? Because pages that have already been indexed are used to determine several factors on your site, one of them being how relevant your information is to the search query that was conducted. If you remove pages that come up on search queries you are losing potential customers or clients.

Now that you know what a 404 error page is, and that they are easily preventable, check which pages the major search engines have listed for your site. Click on each and every link and see if the corresponding page exists on your site. If it goes to an error page then redirect it to a similar page you currently have or a custom 404 error page so that the visitor can find something similar on your site.

The bottom line is: Once you have a visitor on your site you don’t want to lose them simply because they hit a dead end.

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1. How Many of Your Site’s Pages Are Listed on The Top Search Engines?