socialmedian: Smarter 404 with embeded Google Search Widget

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Smarter 404 with embeded Google Search Widget

Source: blog.immeria.net

Oct 22, 2009

Summary

When I posted on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum to announce the availability of the free Web Analytics Maturity Model paper, the post included this text: "the paper at http://immeria.net/wamm." (notice the dot). The link was broken because of the way Yahoo! parses text to automatically build links.

Step 1: Use custom 404 pageThe first step to improve broken links handling (404 errors) is to modify your web server configuration to point to a custom page handler instead of the default, very technical and dull error. For example, doing this on an Apache-based web server is as simple as adding the line "ErrorDocument 404 /http404.htm" to a file named .htaccess in the root folder of the site.

The specifics of your server configuration isn't the goal of this post. Contact your IT department or search for "custom 404 page" and similar keywords for additional help.

Step 2: Make a smarter 404 pageThe custom 404 page handler is just another HTML page, so it can include your site navigation, brand and useful content. Often, the 404 page will have a de-dramatizing tone and ...Read the full article

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