As the popularity of your blog or website increases, the chances of someone clicking on a link to a deleted or missing page also increases as you modify the site to cater to the behaviour and preferences of visitors.

You might change the look of your site, which to WordPress users means activating or customising a new theme to incorporate the content within a new set of CSS style rules. Although this requires some fine tuning in terms of the placement of widgets and so on, it certainly beats altering the HTML code for every line of every page.

Firefox's version of the dreaded 404 page

You may try to enhance your presence in search engine listings by rewriting a few of your page URLs to make them more search friendly. However, you could discover that you have a mass of broken links whereby new visitors are greeted by a 404 “page not found” error message.

The solution — and I recommend it to everybody who continues to overlook the 404 problem or simply accepts missing pages as part of the dynamic nature of the internet — is to automatically redirect your visitors either to your homepage or to a list of related pages.

This is achieved with style by the nifty WordPress plugin Smart404, which enables the display of a list of excerpts from your most relevant pages or posts based on common tags or categories. No longer will your visitor be met by white space and form the opinion that you simply can’t be bothered to maintain your site.

The plugin works by searching your database for posts or pages with category slugs or tags associated with the missing page, presenting their titles in a list for the visitor. If there are no common tags, you can ensure your visitors are never left with a blank page by editing the default 404 page in your themes folder to include a personalised message, home page link or search box.

It goes without saying that you should keep an updated sitemap in the root folder of your site. This is made possible by the Google XML Sitemaps generator which updates every time I write a new blog entry or make a structural change. I can also manually rewrite my sitemap with a single click, excluding tag and archive pages to limit the memory load on my server.

The All in One SEO pack is an essential tool for any self-hosted WordPress blog. It prevents obscure pages being crawled by searchbots by inserting “no index” rules for tag, archive and category pages.

In summary, all the plugins I have mentioned, when used in combination, should ensure that your site is more searchable and has something relevant to display to visitors arriving from any external link. I am reasonably confident that my visitors will rarely encounter a blank 404 error page.

Tags: 404 error, broken links, WordPress, WordPress plugins
Categories: blogging

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 11.05 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.