Back in March 2007, Bruce Clay, Inc. wrote on their blog about the importance of custom 404 error pages and seo:
- Your custom error page should contain the following ingredients:
- An apology for the error
- A prominent search box
- A link to your site map
- A link to your home page
- Links to the other main areas of your site
- He says to make sure your customized 404 page is larger than 512 bytes or
- some browsers will assume it’s the standard Web server 404 message and
- replace it with their own
- Automatically provides users with helpful suggestions
- It adds a search box for your site with appropriate search suggestions
- It tries to provide alternatives to incorrect URLs