404The role of the page

1to avoid dead links

Website Settings404page, if the website appears dead links, the search engine spider crawling this kind of URL gets the status of“404”status response, knowing that the URL has expired, no longer index the web page, and feedback to the data center to delete the web page represented by the URL from the index database. Avoid dead links affecting the website's inclusion.

2to improve user experience

404page usually means that the user has accessed a non-existent or deleted page on the website, and the server returns404Error page, informs the browser that the requested page does not exist or the link is incorrect, and guides the user to use other pages on the website instead of closing the window and leaving, eliminating the user's frustration.

3to avoid a decrease in trust

Search engines identify the status of web pages through HTTP status codes. When a search engine receives an incorrect link, the website should return404status code to tell the search engine to abandon the index of this link. While if the return200 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 due to some incorrect server configurations may return200 status code or302Status codes, although these status codes do not affect users visiting the website, they may mislead search engines, making search engines believe that this page is a valid page and thus crawl it. If404Too many pages can lead to a large number of duplicate pages, which may be penalized by search engines for cheating.