Does Your 404 Page Suck?

We all dread seeing that horrible 404 error page on some sites when either a link is dead, or a page no longer exists. Most sites don’t think enough to take some time to customize these pieces of deceased web page real estate.

Some webmasters take a little bit of time to jazz up the look, by either displaying their site’s header image on the error page with a custom “Sorry, this page cannot be displayed” message. But there’s more to it than that, and you could also gain traffic to your sites by making sure the 404 page does what it’s supposed to do.

Matt Cutts of Google wrote on his blog this week outlining how you can make your 404 page more attractive in the eyes of Google.

It’s pretty simple… just sign into Google Webmaster Tools and insert the simple JavaScript code into your 404 page template. Google even allows you to customize the code’s CSS to fit your site’s look and feel.

Read more about how to implement Google’s 404 page on Google’s blog.

And dare I say it… thank you, Google.

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