“Why not just edit your 404 page to say ‘Hey, the page you are looking for is not here, click here for the homepage’”

From an SEO standpoint and a “my-page-won’t-be-a-pain-in-the-toosh” standpoint, there are many reasons why Errorlytics redirects are more worthwhile than a 404 page that links to the homepage.  I’m a much better story teller than list writer so I responded with the following story about a pretend webmaster, Bob, and a potential customer, Cathy (mom of some little girl who didn’t get a name in the story)  Here’s what I wrote:

Bob has a website selling T-Shirts with different animals printed on them.  Let’s say that a mom, Cathy, is looking for a website on which she can buy a T-Shirt with a puppy on it for her daughter.  She goes to Google and types “girls’ tshirts, puppies.”  Bob’s indexed, high ranking page for a puppy T-Shirt shows up as the 1st search result.  Cathy clicks this link.  This page URL, however, has been changed, and Bob has not properly redirected the page. Therefore, Cathy gets a 404 page that says “Hey the page you are looking for is not here, click here to go to the homepage”.  This 404 page shows that Bob hopes that Cathy will go to his homepage, do a 2nd search on his site and find the puppy T-Shirt on his site.  Why would Cathy do that though? She is unaware that Bob still has the puppy T-Shirt, she may be tg hinkinthat a 2nd search is pointless.  Also, she could just click her browsers “Back” button sending her back to the Google search results that will happily send her to the other 270,000 sites that have a puppy T-Shirt [maybe even on the 1st click]. Now if Errorlytics told Bob that people were getting this 404 error, he could easily redirect these people to the new puppy T-Shirt page.  Now let’s say that Bob sells his shirts for $15 each.  Even if Bob has the highest tiered Errorlytics account that’s $99.95, Bob only needs to sell 7 shirts to get his money back.

What’s the moral of the story?  A little extra effort can go a long way.  Simply knowing about the 404 errors that people encounter on your site is not enough to preserve your page views and visitor value.  Errorlytics is special in that it identifies the 404 errors that occur on your page, and then prompts you to correct the issue and redirect the user to the most relevant existing page.

Errorlytics is useful for all sorts of things, better SEO, better user experience, less administrative frustration, more insight into your site, etc . But really when it comes right down to it there is really only one thing people want to know when they’re evaluating to a product. Is it worth the cost?

Based on the assumptions below, the answer to that question is an emphatic, YES!

*Calcuations based on 1.5M 404 errors, an average of 4PPV, and 8CPM.

Client Plugins Menu for 404 Drupal Module

After clicking “Client Plugins” you’ll see your choice of all the different platforms that Errorlytics supports. Simply click on Drupal for complete module download, installation and configuration instructions…

Drupal module tabs for Errorlytics

The Drupal module currently supports both 5.x and 6.x versions of Drupal.

We would love to hear your feedback on how Errorlytics has helped your Wordpress site be the best it can be. Use the comments for below or email support@errorlytics.com.

Client Plugins Menu for 404 Wordpress Plugin

After clicking “Client Plugins” you’ll see your choice of all the different platforms that Errorlytics supports. Simply click on Wordpress for complete plugin download, installation and configuration instructions…

Wordpress and Drupal plugin/module tabs for Errorlytics

The Wordpress plugin currently supports the latest 2.6 versions of Wordpress. We have also tested the plugin on versions of Wordpress as far back as version 2.0.7. However, we do recommend that if you are running a version of Wordpress that old that you go through the upgrade process soon!

We would love to hear your feedback on how Errorlytics has helped your Wordpress site be the best it can be. Use the comments for below or email support@errorlytics.com.

Is Errorlytics right for my site?

If you have a 4 page website that hasn’t changed in years, and you have no plans to change it in the near future, the Errorlytics probably offers little to no benefit. However, if you manage a large and constantly updated corporate site, e-commerce store, media or content site, then Errorlytics can help decrease the amount of “bad” traffic – or traffic from humans or spiders that bounce off your 404 page and consequently help increase the number of beneficial visits that allow users to buy more, view more ads, or submit a lead.

Doing a major website upgrade?

In our time as website designers and developers we’ve seen too many companies work very hard and invest lots of money into a new website. They work hard for months on a fresh new design, a fancy new content management system, or the latest and greatest e-commerce platform. Then the big day comes and the new site goes live. In the following weeks traffic actually drops! Visits to the 404 page or “Page Not Found” error page skyrocket. Why!?

It would usually turn out that all of the pages of the old “boring” site were well indexed in Google. They didn’t realize before hand that they were actually bringing in quite a bit of traffic to the site. All those old pages were not correctly redirected with the coveted “search engine friendly” 301 redirect. Errorlytics makes the redirect creation process a breeze – either for individual pages or whole groups of content. No more trying to figure out regular expressions, and no need to write custom scripts. We’ve done the work for you. Just tell Errorlytics how you want to handle your errors in plain English and it does the rest.

Frustrated with an over-tasked and unresponsive tech team?

Maybe you are watching your analytics each week and see those 404s piling up. The lost opportunity makes you cringe! You’ve exported the list of 404s and sent them to your technical team be rectified several times, but between trying to keep everything running, and build great new stuff – they don’t have the time to deal with it.

With Errorlytics, there is a one-time script installation on your server, after that all error management can be put in the hands of a business analyst. No need to bother programmers with writing business logic. Errorlytics makes it easy.

Errorlytics is, quite simply, analytics for website errors. Beyond just reporting errors Errorlytics also makes it easy to fixes common errors that users experience on your website for better user experience and search engine rankings.

Why was Errorlytics created?

As a long time webmasters and website developers, we have used several different methods of tracking and rectifying the inevitable errors that users encounter and any active, well trafficked website. As we started to watch our “problematic” traffic we came to two important realizations:

• Most sites get far more errors than you would expect
• Managing these errors can be critical to helping websites increase conversion, improve search engine optimization efforts, and increase site traffic.
• Once errors are found, writing complex yet still search engine friendly redirects can be a daunting task for non-techie’s and techies alike.

Shouldn’t there be an easy way to not only see what problems people are having on your website, but also correct them easily with one simple tool? That’s where Errorlytics comes in.

How is Errorlytics different than Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool?

Web analytics tools are excellent for a wide variety of measurement and analysis tasks. From understanding how traffic comes into your site, how long users stay, how many pages they look at on average, where they leave, and much, much more – tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Clicky, ClickTracks and many others offer tons of data. Errorlytics however if focused soley on one thing – when things go wrong from the human users, and spiders that visit your site. And when things do go wrong, how can the visit be salvaged and turned into a beneficial visit for you and your site visitors. You put a lot of effort into making your website the best it can be. You design it, you build it, you market it, you drive traffic to it in numerous ways. Why not make sure that as many visitors as possible have a positive experience? Make sure your site functions as well as it can and gives you the most bang for the buck. Sign up for a free Errorlytics account today.

Have feedback about this or other features?  Please let us know at the Errorlytics Support Forums.

We learned that Wordpress is the dominant blog engine, so the Wordpress Errorlytics plugin will be the first blog engine/CMS plugin that we will release and support.

We’re really excited to help webmasters gain visibility of their 404 errors as well as give them the tools to fix them.  We’ll be listening closely to our users, especially during this beta period, so your feedback is greatly appreciated!