Errorlytics Blog

If you have a Wordpress Blog, there are a couple ways to attack the 404 errors on your website.  One plug-in that’s been around for a while is the 404 notifier by Alex King.  This tool has been around for over a year and it has a loyal set of users.  That’s quite understandable because it’s a great Wordpress plug-in.  After installing the 404 notifier plug-in on your site, it automatically starts logging the 404 errors that occur on your site and organizes them into a table layout for your viewing pleasure.  You don’t even need to sign-in to your Wordpress admin area to view your 404 errors.  The Notifier can be configured to generate an RSS feed so you can add the feed to whatever reader you already use.  Therefore you get instant updates without having to constantly log into the administration area to check up on your 404 errors.

Once a 404 error is logged, however, it’s pretty much up to you to go into your code, create redirects and fix the problem so your users don’t constantly land on those same 404 errors over and over again.  Subscribing to a tool like Errorlytics will take you the extra step.  Not only will it track your 404 errors for you, but it allows you to set up simple, plain English (no code) rules so the specified 404 error gets automatically redirected in a search engine friendly manner.   Errorlytics also has the capability of showing you where these 404 errors are coming from, so you can see if you can go even further in decreasing the number of 404 errors that come up on your site.  For example, if an old posting on your friend’s blog links to a page that no longer exists, Errorlytics can show you that URL so you can tell your friend to change the link to the new page.

If your website runs on Wordpress, then the 404 notifier does have the benefit of having all the information in one place, but Errorlytics does feature the RSS feed and/or email update, so that will minimize the amount of times you’ll need to log into Errorlytics to check up on and fix 404 errors.  Also, since Errorlytics works on many types of sites (Wordpress, Drupal, Ruby, PHP, etc.) you can log your 404 errors for all your sites in one location and see what bots or spiders are tripping 404s across all the sites you manage.

As Wordpress users ourselves, we love the 404 notifier plug-in.  If, however, you need a 404 tracking tool, that adds SEO benefit AND works for all different types of websites, then check out Errorlytics.