Having a well customized designed 404 error page for your blog is very important as it has the ability to either retain that visitor or drive away the visitor, that's why today you will learn how to custom redirect all 404 error posts of your blog to the homepage of your Blogspot blog.
Severally you must have come across a 404 error page with the message "Oops, Page Not Found" Or "Oops the page you are looking for has been modified" either while browsing on other people's websites or even on your own website.
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Before we go deep into how to redirect all 404 error pages to the homepage of your Blogspot blog, let us understand what a 404 error is all about and how it affects your site.
What Is 404 Error
404 error is a message displayed to you when you click on a link that is either deleted or modified, for instance, when a surfer clicks on the link https://www.yoursite.com/how-to-build-a-blog and the link was deleted or modified by the website owner to https://www.yoursite.com/complete-guide-to-build-a-blog automatically you will land on a page that tells the surfer that the link they just followed does not exist or modified.
In such a case, there is a 90% probability of that surfer going out of the site and it simply means that the owner of that site has lost that visitor.
As a blogger, instead of losing that visitor, it will be wise that you program your website in such a way that when a surfer lands on a 404 error page of your blog automatically that surfer will be redirected to the homepage of your website, making you retain that surfer.
There are many reasons why 404 error pages exist and below are the common causes of 404 error pages
- When another blog is linked to a non-existing post link
- when you delete a blog post or page
- when moving pages or posts by redesigning your blog
How to redirect 404 error page in blogger
Before you start doing anything first of all get all the links that lead to the 404 error page. You can easily get the whole links from your Google Webmaster Tool Dashboard once the links are many.
To get the links from your Webmaster console, click on the crawl section and right there you can find all the 404 error pages. Here google has helped you to identify all the 404 error links on your blog, but it is done only when those URL has been fetched by Google crawler.
Google Bots or crawler occasionally crawls your website to discover new links and to enable Google to understand your blog, once the crawler comes across a link with a 404 error it sends it to your Google Webmasters dashboard for you and it will be displayed on the crawl section.
You can handle 404 error links in two ways
- Is to redirect all the links to a permanent existing page or links on your blog, which is known as 301 permanent redirections.
- By redirecting all 404 pages to the homepage of your blog. For instance, if the error link is https://www.yoursite.com/abcdefghijklmnop.html instead of redirecting it to another link 'B' using the custom error link, you can redirect it to the homepage of your website or blog.
404 Error link and SEO
404 error links can affect your post SEO ranking in google and other search engines because when the crawler comes to revisit your post link, that link will not be there again thereby leaving the crawlers confused.
Also, it gives a bad user experience. Imagine you are searching for a piece of vital information on a blog and you know that the blog has the information you need, only for you to see a text like this "Sorry, the page you are looking for in this blog does not exist". You will definitely feel bad.
How to redirect all 404 error pages?
You can agree with me that The default 404 error message displayed to you by Blogger is not appealing, so you might want to customize your own 404 error message or you might want to redirect all 404 links to the home page of your blog in order not to lose the traffic.
Professionally, I don't encourage new bloggers to redirect their 404 error links to the homepage of their blog rather I prefer they redirect the link to another existing link or by customizing the 404 pages with useful links in it.
However, in the new Blogspot dashboard, the button "Custom Page Not Found" usually found in search preference settings was modified to accommodate HTML tags.
You can customize well appealing 404 error HTML codes for your blog and paste them inside the "Custom Page Not Found" Box to convince your visitor to visit other useful posts in the blog.
Your customized 404 error page can look like this:
Oops! 404. This page does not exist (moved or renamed). You can go back to our home page using our home page link or you can browse our categories to find related articles.
Category 1
Category 2
Category 3
Category 4
Try using our search box to locate the correct page.
How to redirect 404 error pages to the homepage in blogger
Also, you can redirect all 404 error links to the homepage of your blog by following the below tricks, but professionally I don't encourage this except you are the type of Blogger that doesn't have time to do things manually.
Below is the code to redirect your 404 error links to the home page of your blog Meanwhile, ensure you post these codes before </head> of your blog.
Go to Themes >>Edit Html >> Click Ctrl+F key and search for </head> above the head paste these codes, change the red text to your website link, and save the theme.
<p>Oops, sorry the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.
Wait a bit while we redirect you to our home page>
<meta content='5;URL=YOUR-WEBSITE-LINK HERE' http-equiv='refresh'/>
</b:if>
Conclusion
Having learned how to redirect Blogger 404 error links to the home page link of your blog, do well to check our below frequently asked questions and answer as related to redirection and Search engine optimization.
Frequently asked questions and answers
Q. After redirecting 404 links to the home page, what will happen to my site SEO ranking?
A. In a situation whereby the link you redirected has already been ranked high in SERP and is now redirected to the Home page, there will definitely be a little drop in site ranking.
Q. If I implement these redirection codes on my blog, can I Adjust the redirection timing?
A. Yes, you can adjust the redirection timing. By default, the redirection time is 5 seconds all you need to do is to change the 5 to your desired time ( <meta content='5;URL=YOUR-WEBSITE-LINK HERE' http-equiv='refresh'/></b:if>)
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Waw such a nice post from you guys
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