A 404 page is a page returned when the server cannot provide information normally when the client is browsing the web, or the server cannot respond, and the reason is unknown.
Shanghai Xinli Information Technology will talk to you today about why a 404 page is required for website development, and what is the role of a 404 page?
Why do website development need 404 pages?
When a search engine searches for a wrong link, if you do not set a 404 page, then he will judge that your link is a valid but useless web page, which is very detrimental to the website at this time.
If we set up a 404 page, when the spider visits again, the spider will know that this is an invalid link, which has no real meaning, and the spider will communicate back to the data center that this page is invalid and can be deleted from the database, so that It can reduce the external loss of traffic on our website itself, so that spiders pay more attention to other pages with effective content.
What is the function of the website 404 page?
Avoid dead links
After setting the 404 page on the website, if there is a dead link on the website, when the search engine spider crawls this kind of website and gets a “404” status response, it knows that the URL has expired, so it will no longer index the webpage, and feedback the URL to the data center. of pages are removed from the index database. Avoid affecting website inclusion due to dead links.
Enhance user experience
The 404 page usually means that the user has accessed a page that does not exist or has been deleted on the website. The server returns a 404 error page, telling the viewer that the requested page does not exist or the link is wrong, and at the same time guides the user to use other pages of the website instead of closing the window to leave. Eliminate user frustration.
Avoid trust loss
Search engines use HTTP status codes to identify the status of web pages. When a search engine gets an incorrect link, the website should return a 404 status code, telling the search engine to give up indexing the link. And if a 200 or 302 status code is returned, the search engine will index the link, which leads to a large number of different links pointing to the same web page content. As a result, the search engine’s trust in the website has been greatly reduced.
Many websites have this problem: 404 pages return 200 or 302 status codes instead of 404 status codes.
Avoid punishment
Some websites return 200 status codes or 302 status codes due to some wrong server configurations. Although these status codes have no effect on users who visit the website, they will mislead search engines and make search engines think that the page is Valid pages are crawled.
If there are too many 404 pages, it will cause a large number of duplicate pages, which may be considered cheating by search engines and punished.
