SEO (19) 404 Error page and 301 Redirection

404 Error page

A 404 error page states that the page cannot be found. The spider receives this page from the server in response to a valid URL request. This page along with all rankings will be dropped from the search engine index. Moreover, the spider makes no attempt to crawl the website on receiving this page. Customize the 404 error page, typically with a sitemap to ensure successful crawling of all other web pages by the spider.

301 Redirection

301 Redirection is a spider/visitor friendly strategy to redirect one webpage to another for websites hosted on Apache servers. 301 Redirection is implemented by specifying the source and destination URLs in the .htaccess file. 301 Redirection is interpreted as “moved permanently”. This is required to ensure stability of PageRank for the site. Google interprets http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as two different URLs. As a result, Google assigns different PageRank to same web pages depending on whether they have www in the domain name. This causes the PageRank for mysite.com to be distributed between http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com. Implementing a 301 redirect from http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com will ensure that all pages will be indexed as http://www.mysite.com/myexample.htm. One should pay close attention to ensure that all link building strategies use www in the URL like:

1. “Link to Us” page

2. Search engine and directory submissions

3. Reciprocal linking code

4. Absolute URLs within the site

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 42-43

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