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When someone wants to visit your website, it’s far from ideal if the page they are looking for turns out not to be there. When this happens, the reader will get a page that passes the message that a 404 Error has occurred, this is more or less internet speak for “Wrong number”.

There are a number of reasons why the reader might end up arriving on a 404 page; the most common ones are a mistyped URL or a page that has been removed by the site administrator.  The question is what this means in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Broadly speaking, there are three strategies for dealing with 404 errors:

1. The first SEO strategy is to write a 301 redirect order for all 404 pages; an instruction to direct the error page to a different page, either to the next most relevant page or to the home page. This approach might be called the ‘Stalinist’ approach. With this strategy no dissent is tolerated and regular reviews are undertaken to purge all 404 pages from the site.
2. The inverse strategy where you take inspiration from the Beatles and “Let it be” is the exact opposite of the strategy described above. This essentially involves doing nothing but doing nothing isn’t really a strategy, is it?
3. A final option is to be selective. That means something between donning overalls (strategy 1) and falling asleep (strategy 2) and instead choosing which pages you want to redirect and those that you leave as they are.

If you’re going to be selective then you have to select criteria upon which you base your choices (otherwise you’re not really choosing in any meaningful way, just making random choices). If you are going to start getting choosy then the best way to do so is with the following criteria:

a)      Does the page receive inbound links from important external sources?

b)      How much traffic arrives at the page?

c)       Is there a specific page that the searcher was trying to reach?

An example of an SEO optimized 404 page

Image: Voosh Themes

If you are going to leave 404 errors, it is best to create a page which has a distinctive message and which gives the more determined user an opportunity to find either the page they were looking for, or if it doesn’t exist –  the closest approximation.

Overall, the key is one of opportunity cost; you could fix all the 404 errors but unless this really is the most productive use of your time then you’ll end up spending time that you could have put to use doing something that furthers your SEO strategy.