SEO Navigation Custom Pages for Blogger Not Found 404 Errors

Now a days, we are receiving lots of queries through our Contact Us page by our live visitors. And I took one relevant question every Sunday to discuss with all of you. Today, I will discuss about 404 blogger blog pages.

What is 404 errors?

In simple word, you may conclude that a webpage that does not exist on your blog/site commonly known as 404 errors page. That means if someone type a web address like http://YourBlogUrl.com/blablabla it results to 404 error page on your blog.

Why my blog gets 404 Errors and how can I prevent it

There are many reasons that results 404 errors page on your blogger blog. However, following are most common reasons which generates 404 error pages:

1) Existence of broken links on your blogger blog pages i.e. internal links.
If you are using Google webmaster tool then these links may help you to find out broken links returned when Googlebot attempts to visit a page that doesn’t exist on your blog. To check broken links, just replace my site URL with your own and visit these links.

For Desktop:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-errors?siteUrl=http://www.superwebtricks.com/#t2=1





For Smartphone:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-errors?siteUrl=http://www.superwebtricks.com/#t2=28

2) Presence of invalid links
There may be some invalid links of your blog on other’s websites that have links pointing to your blog page that actually does not exist on your blogger blog.

To see which sites are linking to your blog, visit this link by replacing my site URL with your own blog address:

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.SuperWebTricks.com

3) Existence of incorrect links
Either within an Email Newsletter/message or within a PDF/word documents i.e. an eBook.

4) Old or Wrong URLs
Typing wrong or old URLs on web browser address bar by your live visitors or a reader navigates to your blog page that’s temporarily down.

5) Deleted or Updated URLs
You may have deleted/ renamed any post/page URL from your blog without redirecting the old URL to a new blog post/page.

I think you have understand the actual meaning of 404 errors and the causes behind these Not Found Pages. Now, the question arises whether it will impact either on your site’s ranking in Google or user experience on your site/blog.

Simply, I opines 404 errors are normal part of any webpage and it does not impact on your site’s ranking and you can safely ignore those broken links. However, it may unnecessarily increase Crawl Errors and indexing wrong URLs of your blog by search engines.

Additionally, it may also impact badly on your user’s experience. This is because your visitors may landed on a 404 “Not found” page on your website and most of them may just surf away from your blog. They may not rely on your blog and therefore the trustworthiness of your blog will decrease accordingly.

Accordingly, you may have two solutions for those types of errors. First one is to find all 404 errors links which is next to impossible because you will never be able to control each and every links to your blog, or resolve all 404 errors listed in Webmaster Tools.

Second solution is to create a custom 404 page for your user and show something relevant to what they were looking for. Therefore, I strongly recommend all of you to not ignore 404 errors and create a useful custom page for Page Not Found (404 Errors) on your blog.

By default blogger displays a generic message on the Page Not Found page that you may see on your blog viz. “Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist”.

If the above message is not shown by your blogger blog, then this may be due to your custom template or theme installed on your blog. To get the default message of blogger 404 errors not found page, follow these simple steps:

Step-1:
Login to your blogger account and go to the Template tab and then click on Edit HTML text menu.

Step-2:

Now, click on jump to widget drop down menu and select Blog1 from the option there. Thereafter click on Format template text button.

Step-3:

Now, you will that your mouse cursor is blinking just before Blog1. Now, search the following terms

<b:includable id='status-message'>

You will see the following default codes. If your blog does not exist these codes then replace the whole lines from <b:includable id=’status-message’> to </b:includable> with the following codes.

<b:includable id='status-message'>
<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
<data:navMessage/>
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'><data:navMessage/></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>