If you are a blogger, you already are familiar with 404 pages. If you see a 404 page somewhere on the web, there are two reasons for it: (1) The page you are looking for it was never created, or (2) The page you are looking for it is removed.
If you own a blog there is no proper way to track 404 pages in it. In WordPress there is no native solution to track a 404 page. There are some plugins available but these plugins don’t work well.
However, I have found a way to track 404 pages. Most of the websites owners use Google Webmaster Tools and it tracks 404 pages in your website. I use Webmaster tools from long time but I had never noticed this feature.
To track 404 pages on your website you need to add your website in webmaster tools and verify it.
Must read:
(1) How to add a site in Webmaster tools?
(2) How to verify your website in webmaster tools?
How to track 404 pages in Webmaster tools?
Step 1:
Login to Google Webmaster Tools using Google account. And click on the website.
You have already added a site; you can more than one website. Webmaster Tools shows your sites that you have added in it. Click of the site that you want to work with, if there is only one site click on it.
Must read:
To track 404 pages in Webmaster Tools you must submit a sitemap of your site. In WordPress you can create sitemap using this plugin here. This plugin will create a page for sitemaps and you can add your page in webmaster tools.
(1) How to create a sitemap?
(2) How to submit a sitemap in WMT?
Step 2:
Click on health>Crawl Errors>scroll down the page until you see URL errors.
URL errors section has some of the sub section as Server error, soft 404.
Step3:
Click on not found.
Now you will see the list of all 404 pages in your website. You can download the list by clicking on download.
In above screenshot, you can see there are 2,274 missing pages.
Related posts:
- How to know if Your Site is penalized by Google?
- How to Find Any Blogger’s Adsense Publisher ID?
- How Google Decides PageRank for Your Website?
- How to Submit Sitemap in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com?
- Google Adsense Guide: How to Block Specific Ad Categories?
- Make a website your homepage @google
- How to Enable Two Step Verification for Google Account?
- How to Create a Labnol like 404 Page in WordPress?
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Really nice post, just one quick question how if i redirect all the 404 to homepage. is it going to effect the SEO? Thanks!
I am not sure but it should not hurt because I have seen many top websites using this trick.
a 404 page should return http status code 404 not found, it will not be considered by the SE bots. if it is redirected to home page, then the http status code will be either 301 or 302 based on your redirection code.
The best practice is create a custom page fro 404 errors and have the list of important pages or search option within the website. Please make sure this page should always return 404 status code.
-Satheesh
this is what google says on 404 errors:
In general, 404 errors won’t impact your site’s search performance, and you can safely ignore them if you’re certain that the URLs should not exist on your site. It’s important to make sure that these and other invalid URLs return a proper 404 HTTP response code, and that they are not blocked by the site’s robots.txt file.
source: http://support .google. com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1154698 (remove spaces)
my idea is do not build your website for the search engines, build it for your users.
-Satheesh
I think we should rather create an html sitemap and redirect users on that page it will not only help users to understand navigation of website but also looks good than redirecting on home page.
Your idea is good, it is similar to custom 404 page.
This is a really excellent resource on 404 Pages. Recently implemented Webmaster for a couple of our sites and great to find this blog.
Thank you Rohan.
good informative blog on google webmaster tool but i have question in my google webmaster account there are already 4 website added when i recent add 5 th website its showing DNS error what should i do?? tell me if possible
You did not told which method you applied to verify your sites. There are several methods available to verify your websites.
Yeah, good information. For sitemap, i just added /sitemap.xml after my url . Is that right?
eg- http://make-real-money-online-w.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
is that right sitemap. can you help me to know?
Excellent post. I have been looking for this topic and i found this post rich in information. Thanks and keep sharing.
I really like your writing style, superb information, thank you for posting
Nice article on 404 Pages. Recently implemented Webmaster for a couple of our sites and great to find this blog.I was looking for this information.good work,I have implemented it on my blog
http://www.earnmoneyonlineinbharat.blogspot.com
Nice article on 404 Pages.I was looking for this info quite few days.good work keep it up