Errorlytics Blog

Recently, I received an email from an inquiring mind about the value in Errorlytics.  His question was:

“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.