What is a 404 page? How to set up a 404 page?

Many times when we visit a certain page of the website, 404 will sometimes appear. Many SEO novices don’t care about this, but it plays a vital role in the optimization and ranking of our website. So what is the 404 page? How to set up the 404 page ? Today, Dongguan SEO editor Feng Chao will share it with you.

What is a 404 page?

The purpose of the 404 page is to tell the viewer that the page he requested does not exist or the link is wrong, and to guide the user to use other pages of the website instead of closing the window and leaving.

Many open source systems, including CMS systems and Blog systems, do not provide 404 pages or the 404 pages provided do not meet SEO requirements, which greatly reduces the authority of the website.

How to set up a 404 page?

Search engines use HTTP status codes to identify the status of web pages. When a search engine gets a bad link, the website should return a 404 status code to tell the search engine to give up indexing the link. If a 200 or 302 status code is returned, the search engine will index the link, resulting in a large number of different links pointing to the same web page content. As a result, search engines' trust in the site is greatly reduced. ——Many websites have this problem: the 404 page returns a 200 or 302 status code instead of a 404 status code.
The correct way to create a 404 page is: (only suitable for Apache server)

Add the following code to your .htaccess file: ErrorDocument 404 /Error.html
Create a simple html404 page named Error.html

Place Error.html in the root directory of the website

Do not redirect 404 errors directly to the homepage of the website, as this will result in the homepage not being included;
Do not put the primary domain name in front of /Error.html, otherwise the returned status code will be 302 or 200.