404The role of the page

1To avoid dead links

Website Settings404After the page, if the website appears dead links, the search engine spider crawling such URLs will get the status of “404”status response, knowing that the URL has expired, no longer index the web page, and feed back to the data center to delete the web page represented by the URL from the index database. Avoid affecting the inclusion of the website due to dead links.

2To improve user experience

404Pages are usually for users who visit non-existent or deleted pages on the website, and the server returns404Error pages, inform the browser that the requested page does not exist or the link is incorrect, and guide users to use other pages on the website instead of closing the window and leaving, to eliminate the user's frustration.

3To avoid a drop in trust

Search engines identify the status of web pages through HTTP status codes. When a search engine receives a broken link, the website should return404Status code to tell the search engine to abandon the indexing of this link. And if the search engine returns200 or302Status code, the search engine will create an index for this link, which leads to a large number of different links pointing to the same web content. As a result, the search engine's trust in the website is greatly reduced. Many websites have this problem:404The page returns200 or302Status code instead of404Status code.

4To avoid punishment

Some websites may return200 status code or302Status codes, although these status codes do not affect users visiting the website, they may mislead search engines, causing search engines to believe that this page is a valid page and thus crawl it. If404Too many pages result in a large number of duplicate pages, which may be penalized by search engines for cheating.