Setup Website Page Errors

Blogger Custom Page Not Found

If you do a Google search for “Creative custom 404 pages,” you’ll see examples of people who have customized pages that would have otherwise ended up looking something like this:

Bloggers often create customized 404 pages to provide a bit of comic relief to their readers, and prevent them from experiencing generic, unfriendly error messages.

If you have a broken link on your blog, or, a reader navigates to a page that’s temporarily down, having a customized 404 page provides your readers with a better user experience. Customized 404 pages are also a great opportunity to provide some help to your users by linking them back to your blog, or give a few pointers on navigation.

You can find the option to create a customized 404 page by going to Settings | Search Preferences. To enter your custom message, click Edit to open the text box. Type the copy you’d like to appear on the page, then click Save changes. If you’d like to get more creative than using standard text, you can use simple HTML or CSS (if your template has a style file loaded).

Settings For Blogger 404 Error Page, Redirects and Meta Tags 

What are the new Search Features?

Six important SEO options have been added to Blogger in draft which are:

1.     Meta Tags for Homepage and Sub-pages

2.     404 Error Page

3.     Custom Redirects for broken links

4.     Custom Robots.txt         For Advanced users

5.     Custom robots header tags     For Advanced users

6.     Nofollow attribute for post Editor links

Caution: Out of six new features only two which relate to crawling and indexing of search robots are restricted for advanced users. I would therefore recommend not to play with them because wrong settings can terribly effect search credibility of your blog therefore keep them as default.

To set the new SEO settings do this:

1.     Go To draft.blogger.com

2.     Then Go to Settings > Search preferences

Errors and redirections

Most of you know that Google webmasters give you several links which are either broken or no more exits. Broken links refer to Pages that no more exits on your blog because for some reason you may have deleted them. Now if some website is linking one of your posts that you deleted then you wont get the reward of the PageRank juice from that website to yours instead if people click that link they will land no where in your blog and will see a 404 Page not found error. There was no concept of a 404 error page before instead this page would appear:

Therefore in order to redirect deleted post links to new links and create a custom 404 Error page do this:

404 Error Page

1.     Click the Edit link next to Custom Page Not Found

2.     Inside the box write a message that you want to display when readers land on a missing page (404 page):

You can write any message inside this box using simple HTML but once you click save changes and see how your error page looks, you will see that it looks dull and grey and appear inside an ugly box. In order to give it a good designed look with custom CSS styles just like ours then kindly wait for my next post.

Joomla error pages:

Use 404 error pages:

You may often observe a Joomla website’s default 404 error page with little information regarding the error as well as a link to the home page. You ought to be setting up a 404 page, either making use of some kind of plugin or setting up one manually. Take in important resource on this page for directing the user someplace back to the website. Or take in search form which is able to be employed by the user for getting back on track. Or make use of a few of the phrases from query of user on the preceding page and create a search outcome page yourself. The point here’s to keep away from users getting irritated by the mean error page.

HTML Errors

Check for html errors, bad JavaScript and CSS. All of these can hurt your rank if done wrong. Check every post you create using the W3C markup validation service here: http://validator.w3.org/. Check CSS here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. Just type in the URL of the newly published post and see what needs to be fixed

 Website Page Errors

Your first step should be to review the site for broken links (404’s) or any temporary redirects (302’s). You can use a bunch of tools for this like Screaming Frog or Link Slueth.

Make a list of all the links that need to redirected and do so either via HTACCESS or via your favorite CMS plugin or control panel.

For 404 errors, you want to make sure the broken page is redirected to the appropriate new page. If none exist on your new site, redirect it to the homepage, so you keep all your link equity.

For any 302 pages, make sure they are converted to 301 eventually. This step should ensure your site is easier to crawl for both visitors and search engine bots.