404The role of pages

1To avoid dead links

Website Settings404After the page, if the website appears dead links, search engine spiders crawling these URLs will get404”status response, knowing that the URL has expired, it will no longer index this 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

404Pages usually occur when users access non-existent or deleted pages on the website, and the server returns404Error pages to inform the browser that the requested page does not exist or the link is incorrect, while guiding users 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 codes to tell search engines to abandon the indexing of this link. And if returned200 or302Status codes, search engines will create an index for this link, resulting in a large number of different links pointing to the same page content. As a result, the trust of search engines in the website is greatly reduced. Many websites have this problem:404The page returns200 or302Status codes instead of404Status codes.

4To avoid being penalized

Some websites due to some incorrect server configurations, causing the return to be200 status code or302Status codes, although these status codes do not affect users visiting the website, they may mislead search engines and make search engines believe that this page is a valid page, thus crawling it. If404Too many pages result in a large number of duplicate pages, which may be penalized by search engines as cheating.