In search of the ‘Perfect’ 404 pt 1.

When I first started doing webpage design I stumbled on an article at A List Apart titled "The Perfect 404." The article, written by Ian Lloyd, discusses the importance of building a 404 page that goes above and beyond the traditional (rather bland) template.

Since reading that article my 404 page has been at the center of much tinkering. Every couple of weeks when I review my template, and think about optimizing it, I wander back to my 404 and try to figure out what I can do better. At this point I've incorporated most of the suggestions from the A List Apart article but I've also added a few extra things.

Cutting out AdSense

The first thing you should do when setting up your 404 page is block any AdSense code from appearing. One longstanding point in the AdSense TOS restricts publishers from displaying ads on any error pages - which can be problematic depending on your publishing platform. If you're using WordPress and need to get control over your 404 pages don't fear, check out this post which covers using conditional tags to keep AdSense code off your 404s.

Special Content for Search Engines

While many 404s can be the result of mistyped addresses a lot of times content just goes poof. Maybe your permalink structure changed, maybe you deleted an old post, maybe something just happened. Google is usually pretty good at removing 404 pages but sometimes a visitor can end up on your site at a broken or removed address. Awhile back I started using the Landing Sites plugin by The Undersigned, a WordPress plugin that I find incredibly useful. Right now I've got the plugin on my index page and my 404 page - it detects incoming traffic from Google and provides a list of related links.

On the 404 page this is great because it looks at the search query and then applies it to the rest of your content. If a user runs a search for "Scrubs" (I'm watching it right now,) and they land on a 404 page, Landing Sites will create a list of posts from your site which refer to "Scrubs." What's great here is that it gives your visitors a list of content that may fill they're search query.

More to come...

You can read the secon part of this series at In Search of the Perfect 404 pt 2.