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Outdated inbound links and misspelled URLs (from less-than-careful webmasters) will send viewers to your site - but they'll land on your Page Not Found page - not on the page you've intended them to land. These links are out of your control and could bring negative consequences to your site and stats, if you don't take two simple steps to convert exits on your "Page Not Found" record into pageviews. So how do you convert these would-be viewers that are being turned off by the Page Not Found error into regular viewers of your site that browse multiple pages? By following this simple advice: 1 - Rework the template/content of your "Page Not Found page"...instead of the technical-speak of a standard Error message, humanize the message with verbiage that sounds, well, like a human wrote it. ex. use "Hmm, we can't seem to find this page" instead of "Page Not Found!" Your viewers will keep the faith in your site, and be more likely to click around - they won't think the site is broken, and they have multiple options on where to navigate next on your site, etc. 2. Provide aesthetically pleasing "gateways" on the Page Not Found template (a rollover image, a control panel of buttons directing viewers to popular areas of your site. These gateways -whether they are text, graphic, flash, etc -should be present so that your viewers have multiple options (and the motivation to click thru to them) on the error page, instead of turning visitors away with an error message and a text-link to the homepage. To give you an example of how it has worked, in at least 1 situation: When my company (changed domains and) relaunched their site LogHome.com, we had a lot of outdated inbound links pointing to now-erroneous pages (the file path had changed, etc) and the result was an increase of visits on our "Page Not Found" page. The Exit Rate was 88% and the Bounce Rate was 93% We changed the traditional error message to the aforementioned updated style of error page and the Exit Rate plummeted to 32% while the Bounce Rate went down to 34% Take a look at our revamped Page Not Found page, it's nothing special, but it works: Erroneous URL on LogHome.com And - let me know if this works for you! | |||||||||||||||||||
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Related keywords: bounce, convert, converting, easiest, error, exit, fix, gateways, inbound, links, lost, moved, multiple, outdated, page, pageviews, rate, rates, template, viewers, views, visitors, works, 404 | |||||||||||||||||||
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November 2007 I've forwarded this article to myself at my office - this is advice I'm putting to work for our site ASAP!
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November 2007 Glad to hear it was helpful! Let me know how it has changed your Exit Rate for that page - if you don't mind! I want to see if my company was unique for having such drastically positive results.
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5.00 (Excellent) Vote:
November 2007 As another suggetion, when you go get a 404 coming from an external source for a misspelt URL, consider 301 redirecting them. Contacting webmasters asking for them to change the link is going to be a time consuming task. The 301 will provide visitors with the correct page and also help the SEs. Unfortunately no one will get to see your custom error page but that is kind of the point right? Of course is the source is an internal link, fix it!
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4.91 (Excellent) Vote:
November 2007 we recently re-worked our 404 pgs...ineedhits sample 404
when we did them - we had three primary goals - soften the techno lingo...visitors don't care about errors and codes. - take responsibility for the error...no point telling the visitor they made a mistake - provide a gateway to what the visitor might have been looking for....Keep them on the site Reply
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November 2007 i like what you've done there - did it alter your Exit Rate or Bounce Rate for those pages?
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(November 2007) (
