It is important to find and fix 404 errors that can occur in your WordPress blog. This allows you to take corrective measures to ensure visitors to your blog are presented with your content and not an error page. Earlier this year I wrote a post that explained how you can remove broken links in your WordPress blog. The post talked about using a plugin to detect any broken links within the posts on your blog. This plugin proved very useful as it found many links that were no longer valid.
I recently decided I wanted to see if I can detect links that were pointing to my blog, but weren’t valid. Such links would produce a 404 “not found” error on my blog, and may prevent some traffic from reaching a specific destination. To help with detecting 404 errors, I installed a plugin that will notify me when the errors occurred.
Finding 404 Errors on Your Blog
Finding the 404 errors on my blog came about when I viewed my server logs for Technically Easy. I was surprised at the number of 404 errors had occurred each month, and I decided I wanted to reduce the number that happen. While I can’t reduce the number to zero each month, I can at least bring it down to a more reasonable number.
To help with this process I searched for a WordPress plugin that would help. I found a plugin called 404 Notifier.
This plugin simply will notify me when a 404 hit occurs on my blog. I can be notified by e-mail or through an RSS feed it generates. I tried the e-mail option first, but was quickly overwhelmed with the number of mails, so I switch to subscribing to the RSS feed.
Everyday I view the feed and can see all the links that produced a 404 error on my blog. If the link was located on a referring site, I can see the referring site’s URL so I can have a look.
Many times, the links weren’t properly created on a referring site, so I would just go into my .htaccess file and redirect that link to the correct location. I managed to find a few links that were followed by Google’s Googlebot that I eventually corrected.
While I can’t say this has increased my traffic now that some of the links have been corrected, I can say that visitors will now get the correct page.
Find More Than Bad Links
One benefit I have seen with using the plugin is that of finding hackers. There are certain plugins that have a known security hole that hackers will try to exploit. Even though I haven’t installed those plugins, it doesn’t stop hackers from trying.
In my 404 RSS feed, I sometimes see their attempts at trying to exploit those security holes, since they generate a 404 on my blog. I have been thinking about doing something about that, more than returning a 404 page to the hackers, perhaps redirect them to another page. I haven’t figured out what to do with them yet. I’m all ears for some suggestions, however.
In the meantime, I will continue to monitor any links to my site that aren’t valid, and correct them if needed. I would rather have a visitor be redirected to the correct page, than to the 404 page on my blog.
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on December 26, 2009 at 12:12 am
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I read a post about doing more with your 404 pages but had to put it on the backburner with the Christmas busy time.
on January 8, 2010 at 8:23 am
Send the hackers somewhere that they’ll get a nasty virus or something. It would served them right!
on January 21, 2010 at 7:10 pm
lol or send them to a full page with ads so you get some money out of it?
Twitter: michaelaulia
on January 22, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I should do that. The only thing is that they may falsely click many of the ads. After awhile, I’m not sure how Google would react.
on September 26, 2011 at 4:44 am
Hi there. Thanks a lot for sharing this. it’s a very nice tips. Very helpful!
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