Help Google Help You
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Matt Cutts of Google blogged about a useful tool from Google that will enable affiliates to find the pages that link to 404 pages on their sites.
Let me back up and give you a little history. When someone comes to your site’s webserver and asks for a page that doesn’t exist, like http://www.mattcutts.com/asdfasdfasdf , most web servers are configured to return an HTTP status code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors.
I just checked out sites I run and was feeling a little high and mighty when my blog didn’t show any 404 errors.
But then I fell to Earth when I saw that my affiliatetip.com site had 316 pages not found, 91 pages not found at affiliatesummit.com, and 34 not found at affiliatemanager.net.
Looks like I need to do a whole bunch of fixing and setup some enhanced 404 pages.
More details at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/webmaster-tools-shows-crawl-error.html.
- Posted in Affiliate News, Affiliate Resources
6 Comments
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On October 15 @ 8:48 pm posted[...] Help Google Help You [...]
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On October 16 @ 11:10 am posted
[...] Help Google Help You [...]
That tool can be very handy. I just was looking on one of my websites where all I did was to refresh datafeeds a week ago and have already +1,000 404s reported in my Google Webmaster Central.
Even though I have customized the 404 page in such a way that explains that certain product may have been discontinued and offer to search my website for other products.
But you never know who might be linking to you via links pointing to pages that no longer exist. The tool certainly can come very handy.
reply to this commentShawn, at least your errors are not in thousands like mine… Not my blog, but few of the affiliate sites I operate.
reply to this commentThat tool can be very handy. I just was looking on one of my websites where all I did was to refresh datafeeds a week ago and have already +1,000 404s reported in my Google Webmaster Central.
Even though I have customized the 404 page in such a way that explains that certain product may have been discontinued and offer to search my website for other products.
But you never know who might be linking to you via links pointing to pages that no longer exist. The tool certainly can come very handy.
reply to this commentShawn, at least your errors are not in thousands like mine… Not my blog, but few of the affiliate sites I operate.
reply to this comment