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What is 404 Error?

When someone tries the access a web page from your website and if that page doesn’t exist, web server returns the HTTP status code 404 – Page not found.

Importance of 404 pages in search engine optimization:
Google and other search engines crawls the websites using the links and when the search engine lands with dead link, it can not determine more information about the page.
  
These dead links provide the website visitor a bad experience about the website. You can not control people linking bad or dead links. From search engine perspective unless you do some extra work you will never get the credit for these dead links. Google Webmaster tool does excellent job to display urls which are broken or not followed for various reasons.

Why good links become bad links:
Human error is most obvious reason behind bad linking. But sometimes websites moves from one location to another and that creates the lot of bad links. (Please note, you can use the permanent redirect, 301 as a primary method to deal with these situations. We will cover 301 some other time)

404 & SEO:
So far we know page not found is bad thing and takes time to fix the error links. But can we use these bad links to our advantage. Answer is yes, by creating unique and funny 404-page not found page. So when website visitor follows the broken links, he/she will see the funny 404 page. It creates the buzz about your business and people love these funny 404 errors because after all who doesn’t want to get thru tough times with some laughter. So we are working on our 404 page and if you have some custom 404 pages, please share with us

Check out the link to some funny 404 pages