Looking for some information urgently and you land on a 404 error page - nothing can be more frustrating than that. The 404 pages are painfully for webmasters and more painful for users. The 404 page causes a dilemma for SEO’s as to what exactly should be done about the 404 pages whether they should be kept as it is or they should be or they should be redirected using 301 redirect.

Basically the thing that can be implemented for 404 pages is that the error urls should be kept as they are only if your answer to the following questions is No

- Do they appear in search engine rankings- that is even if not in the top 10 -15 pages?
- Do they bring good amount of traffic?
- Are they the obvious pages that a visitor would be looking for on your site?
- Does the page receive important inbound links?

Also redirecting every 404 error page url to home page can be more confusing for the end users as they are looking for some specific information and the redirect takes them to home page before realizing that they are being redirected they try the same url again and again thinking they might have made a mistake some where that’s the reason they reached the home page. While a 404 page at least makes it sure that the visitor realizes that there is something wrong and he can decide what he would like to visit.

So it would be better to customize the 404 page so as to provide other url of the site the visitor might be interested in visiting. The customization of 404 page will definitely be helpful for the end user giving him a better experience.

Tags: 301 redirect, 404 error page, search engine optimization, seo