Custom Error Pages Can Plug The Holes Where Your Visitors Leak Out

If you had a store at the local mall, would you set up your displays in such a way that some shoppers were forced down a one-way aisle and out a door at the end, making them walk all the way back around the front to get back in your store?

Of course not, that would just be silly.

And yet, I see websites that are set up like that all the time. They go to all the trouble of getting visitors, but when a visitor performs some action - like taking a poll, clicking an affiliate link or trying to download something - they find themselves on an error page that does not look at all like the website they just saw.

Now, most surfers are web-savvy enough to find their way back, but many others aren't - and some are just annoyed and impatient enough that they don't even try to return. They simply go back to google, try another website, and you lose them forever.

It happens, links go bad: promotions end, merchants cancel their programs (and don't bother telling us about it), we change pages and a visitors cached page doesn't have the new url, websites go offline temporarily... there are many reasons for a link to be 'Bad'.

The question is this - when someone clicks a bad link from your website, uses a bookmark, or follows a link to a page that you've moved, what happens? Are they sent to a 'generic', unhelpful error page, or to a page that looks like the rest of your website, and has helpful information? Do they have the option of trying another link or are they left out there in limbo, wondering whatthehell just happened?

What can you do about it? How can you 'Save' more of those surfers?

First and Best: make sure that all links and features on your website are working perfectly, and you should double check all your links regularly, especially any links that lead off your website.

Don't change page names if you can help it.

If you link to features on other websites (videos, articles, games, etc.) explore the possibility of hosting the feature on your website. That way, if the other website vanishes, your link still works.

But no matter what you do, there are always going to be a few links that somehow end up at the infamous 404 Error - Page Not Found.

When That Happens, You Should Have Your Own Custom Error Pages.

The most commonly seen is the 404 error, and most visitors hit them from a bookmark or a search engine listing that hasn't been updated for a while. If they hit a plain 404 page, they may assume that your website is gone and return to the search engine.

If you have a custom error page, they will see that they have reached the right place, but still need to find the info they want. You can reduce their annoyance and make things easier for them by showing them a helpful, user-friendly, custom error page.

Tips For Designing Helpful, User-friendly Error Pages

 * Give lost visitors a friendly error message with an informal tone. "ERROR. Missing Page" is cold and impersonal... something like "Oops! We couldn't find that page, try these options:" is more personal and helpful.

 * Provide prominent links to your home page, main sections and 'Special Offers' or 'New Stuff' pages, this will save a lot of them right away.

 * One helpful option to offer is a link to your site map. A small website (under 100 pages) may even show the entire site map right on the error page. This would be helpful for people who have a good idea of what they are looking for.

 * Another helpful option would be to place your site search form on the error page and let them search your website from there.

 * You could put your contact form on the error page and ask the surfer to fill it in if he is looking for something specific. With the right formmail script, you could even pre-fill the "Missing page:" field with the URL of the missing page, and the "Referring page:" field with the URL of the page they came from.

(If you do that reply as quickly as possible when someone uses it. Tell them how to find what they were looking for and thank them for letting you know about the bad link. That kind of attention is so rare on the web that you will stand out from the crowd.)

 * Make your error pages larger than 512 bytes. Any smaller than that and older versions of Internet Explorer will use the ugly built-in "friendly HTTP error message" instead of your custom page.

 * Also, remember that your error pages may be accessed from a sub-directory or your CGI-BIN as well as the main directory.... so be sure to use the full URL path for all links and images that show on the error page.

 * One more thing: Don't use the error page to automatically re-direct lost surfers to your home page. It may seem like a good idea, but if they came from a search engine and were looking for something specific, landing on your home page without any idea of how they got there is not a good way to make a new friend.

If you want to try to monitize error pages, you may want to use a rotating banner ad. Banner rotator scripts are easy to come by. (Do Not Put Google Ads On Error Pages!)

Hiding your Error Pages from 'Bots

You probably don't want your error pages to show up in search engine results. To hide these pages from them you simply create a robots.txt file and upload it to your root directory. Below is an example of how you can hide a certain file or directory, this is an example, edit it to suit your own needs.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /private_files/
Disallow: /404error.htm
Disallow: /500error.asp

For more help with using robots.txt files visit robotstxt.org

To stop a 'bot that has stumbled onto your error page from going any further, make sure that you also add a robots meta tag within the <head> tags of any error page.
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

What about affiliate links that have expired?

This is my personal Pet Peeve - and if you are advertising for affiliate networks you have experienced first-hand just how fast some links go bad - and just how slow some of them are to tell you about it.

Many networks, (Commission Junction, LinkShare and others) take the easy way out and send your surfer to a page that says "Expired Link" and leave it at that. Not so good. Makes it look like you haven't updated your website in a while.

A few networks (Commission Junction & Affiliate Fuel) do provide reports on invalid links that get traffic. That can be helpful, but you still have to check the report regularly. Some are good about sending messages when promotions are expiring, (MaxBounty, Hydra) but most don't.

Others, like MaxBounty, automatically send a surfer to a different promotion if they click a bad link. While that may be better than a generic "Expired" page, it's still not good... because when somebody follows a link for something like a workout DVD, but instead lands on a page about free gum samples, they get confused and annoyed - and it's YOUR Credibility that suffers, not the networks.

What you can do about expired affiliate links.

The main thing is just to keep up with the ones that you're promoting, and remove them as they expire. Work with networks like MaxBounty and Hydra that are helpful, and stop working with networks that don't bend over backwords to help.

Use links that automatically update (like the DRM links from LinkShare), and make pages with datafeed services like GoldanCAN, Cusimano & DataFeedFile (and MotionMall for Amazon affiliates).

There are a few networks that allow you to send surfers to a custom page if they click an expired link.... ShareASale & CanadianSponsors, for example. Simply make a page that fits with your website and says something like "We're sorry, but that special promotion has ended. Please return to our site or try (this promotion)". Then when someone lands there at least they don't feel lost, abandoned or misled.

Your Web Host

Most hosts allow you to create your own error pages - and those few who don't really don't deserve your business.

However, different hosts do have different requirements for custom error pages, so I can't get into the 'How-To' part of getting them activated on your website - just go to your control panel, or your hosts' FAQ page, and see what you need to do. It won't be hard, and once you've made them, you'll rarely need to do updates.

These are the most common error codes that visitors see, so these are the ones that deserve custom pages:
400   Bad Request
401   Authorization Required
403   Access Forbidden
404   Page Not Found
500   Internal Server Error
503   Service Unavailable

Wrapping Up

The larger your website is, the more links you will have that will "go bad" for one reason or another. The best thing you can do is keep on top of your links and affiliate promotions and make sure that they are all current.... that way your visitors don't get sent away at all.

I have no doubt that you work hard for every visitor that comes to your website - and when someone encounters an error, you're on the verge of losing them - perhaps forever.

Creating and using custom error pages is an easy way to minimize the number of visitors you lose from bad links.

They are not difficult to make and most webhosts make their implementation simple, so the little bit of time it takes getting them set up will be time well spent.

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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