Site Navigation for SEM

Managing Broken Links

While web marketers should do their best to direct users from old pages to new, invariably some links will lead users and search engines to a dead end.  On the web this means the dreaded “page not found” screen will appear in the web browser when a web server is unable to locate the requested page.  Marketers should understand that a “page not found” message (technically called a 404 error) is not always due to website mistakes.  This error is triggered any time a web address cannot be located on a server.  So any broken link pointing to the marketer’s website, whether on the marketer’s site or on an external site, will produce this error if the URL is not reachable.  For example, if a major news website posts a favorable article about a marketer’s product but mistakenly lists a wrong web address the 404 server error will appear when readers attempt to click the link from the news website.  Under this situation, search engines crawling the news site may follow the link to the marketer’s site but will quickly leave the site when it encounters the “page not found” error, thus preventing the indexing of the page at least until the robot returns to the marketer’s website which may be some time later.

To overcome the “page not found” dead end, marketers are wise to produce a customized 404 error page.  This page should give the appearance of a regular webpage found on the site and should contain menus so that if a person or search engine robot  reaches this page they are aware that a real site does exist.  This approach will also allow a search robot to index other parts of the site by following the links.