Save Your Links http error 404 – file or directory not found

“Redirect your bad http error 404 – file or directory not found incoming links and save your links juice”

Thanks for visiting.

If your into affiliate marketing or just enjoy blogging you may well have a lot of bad 404 links out there, it’s time to save your links and point them at more importent pages or post of your blog.

In this article, we will look at a practical free wordpress plugin to save your links and redirect them away from your 404 error page and channel the links to the posts and pages where you really need the link juice to flow into.

In the early day’s weeks and months of your blog, you may have embarked on a back linking campaign to promote and build your search engine rankings. Your visitor’s also may have built links back to your content on social networks and from their own website or blog.

Constant tweaking of your blog, moving and deleting of posts and pages results in the ever increasing flow of visitors finding themselves landing on your 404 page.

However, this is not what you really want to happen. Lots of 404 page errors can result in lower rankings for your blog. Furthermore, the vast majority of visitors find 404 pages to be frustrating when they follow a bad link.

Believe me, they will not thank you for it, no matter how constructive or funny you make your 404 landing page. It’s far better to save your links and redirect your visitors and the search engine’s bots which find these links to similar content or directly to your home page.

If you do this using a 301 permanently moved to, and redirect those bad links, you can save your links and retain any link juice those bad links bring to your blog.

So how do you track down and save your links from leading to a 404 page?

First thing you need to do is sign up for a Google account if you don’t alredy have one. http://www.google.com/webmasters/
You can also sign up for Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/ to find those 404 links Google hasn’t yet found.

In this article we will concentrate on bad links Google as encountered.

The important tool to help save your links and stop your host’s server from issuing http error 404 – file or directory not found errors is a free plugin called Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin you can find it here. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-pagepost-redirect-plugin/

Side Note: Its good to remember here that all search engines see two sites. One with and one without the WWW. Prefix So it’s good to start off as you intend to go. Never build back links with both url types, there is some concern that search engines will consider links back to http://www.yourblog.com and http://yourblog.com as linking back to seperate blogs. In Google’s case even more so they show two sites in your webmaster tools. 

To save your links going to the 404 page, install the free Plugin on your wordpress blog then:

Sign into Google Webmaster tools and select your site. Then look at Crawl errors… click on the link that says, “not found” this will take you to a new page with all the links that lead to your 404 page. You can click on these links to indeed confirm they lead to your 404 page. Once you confirm you have a inbound 404 link it’s time to save your links.

Go back to your admin panel on your blog and click on Quick Redirects you will find this once you install and activate the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin.

Select Quick Redirect, this will take you to the quick redirect control panel.

Go back to your open browser window with the Issues Google encountered when crawling your site and right click on the first 404 error link and copy the link… You can also download these links and work from a spreadsheet, but personally, I like to work directly in my browser window.

Go back to your quick redirects window and past the link you just copied into the Request Box now just remove the http://www.yourdomin from the front end of the link. You only need the part of the link from the first / slash /2317/some-bad-link /category/some-bad-link.

In the Destination Box, you need to copy or type in the url where you want the bad incoming link to redirect.

These are 301 redirect witch will tell the search engines you have moved the content permanently to a new location. Any would-be visitors to your blog will be redirected to the new content, website or blog without even noticing the new destination.

Good quality back links are hard to find at the best of times, to have them pointing at a page no one will ever search for unless they have an issue themselves, it makes no sense to waste all that link juice flowing back to your 404 page.
Save your links and your hard-earned  link juice starting today, get to it.

Tags: file or directory not found, http error 404, redirect bad links, save your links

Category: Affiliate Marketing General Articles