> https://pillser.com/engineering/yeah%20right 404 Not Found Nothing to see here. Pillser
"At the moment, I've applied this logic only to the supplement pages, but I am planning to extend it to the rest of the website."
Designing a website without 404s
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people who use this site would use the search bar, which reports errors, and those who directly type it in aren't exactly laypeople.
Lay people certainly might bookmark a medication they buy often, and if "the smart website silently replaces the correct drug with something similar but wrong" they might end up accidentally ordering and even consuming it.
This is the key to why “nothing is better than a best guess” is the right approach.
Answers that appear to be right can be worse than no answer at all.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#43> I am surprised that more websites do not implement it Maybe because it is not a good idea. Masking errors is harmful. The information "what you're looking for is not there" is very important, because it lets users identify that something is wrong. Smart redirection can be outright dangerous: what if I am buying a medication, and the smart website silently replaces the correct drug with something similar but wrong?…
Well how about this instead:
- Keep the 404 page
- Use autocorrection only for minor typos
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#44> I am surprised that more websites do not implement it Maybe because it is not a good idea. Masking errors is harmful. The information "what you're looking for is not there" is very important, because it lets users identify that something is wrong. Smart redirection can be outright dangerous: what if I am buying a medication, and the smart website silently replaces the correct drug with something similar but wrong?…
> Lastly, the U in URL stands for unique; the web is designed around unique locators
It doesn't in a literal sense and not even in a practical sense.
The web in no way is designed around unique locators (not even unique identifiers). And for the search engines you point to there is metadata like `link rel=canonical` to help them around the obvious reality that one webpage may have many different locators (and you will find that used on most major websites)
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#45Hey everyone! Thank you for your feedback.
Whether it is positive or negative, I do appreciate it as it helps me to learn and improve the product. I really didn't expect this to get any attention, let alone dozens of comments!
To clarify: This was originally designed to help me auto migrate URL schema. I am learning as I develop this website, and SEO has been one of those vague topics where there are few hard rules. I wanted to leave space for experimentation. As I rolled it out, I became intrigued with how it functions and wanted to share my experiment with you to get feedback.
Based on the feedback, I plan to change the logic such that:
- I will track which URLs are associated with which products - If user hits 404, I will check if there was previously a product associated with that URL and redirect accordingly - If it is a new 404, I will display a 404 page which lists products with similar names
I appreciate everyone hopping in to share their perspective!
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#46I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for".
The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it.
There are many good comments already and my suggestions would merely be repeating them, so, just adding my voice that this is likely to be a bad idea. Far, far, better to simply have a useful 404 page.
Edit just to add: if you do something like this, make sure you have a valid sitemap and are using canonical tags.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#47> the implementation is so simple that I am surprised that more websites do not implement it I might be wrong but for me it’s because IRL this isn’t an issue. Users shouldn’t be finding/using random URLs to navigate the site. Where is this broken URL traffic coming from anyway? Are you trying to solve for people that randomly edit the URL and expect it work, most people don’t care about those users getting 404 becaus…
Link rot is a thing. Scroll around some older reddit threads with links and see how many of them are still active. Site redesigns are often the cause of older links rotting to become no longer valid.
link rot doesn't happen by the slug in a url subtly changing
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#48WordPress does this sort of thing, or at least can (I don’t know, I’ve only ever been involved with a couple of WordPress sites). It’s obnoxiously awful. You end up with people accidentally relying on non-canonical URLs that subsequently change in meaning, or using links that seem to work but actually give the wrong content and you don’t notice. Both of these are very often much worse than a 404. There’s also an issu…
You could even make your 404 page embed your search, knowledge base and FAQs.
There used to be a plugin (or something) that would let you play Zork on a 404 page.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#49I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…
Agreed. You could make a very useful 404 page with the list of candidate URLs being used to do the redirect: It's exactly the thing you want to display in a "Did you mean x?" message on that page.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#50I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…
This is absolutely right. The duplicate content flags alone will cancel everything out.
I don't understand why people don't just read Google's own published guidelines ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...) on how to properly SEO one's site.
It's not some dark art. Google themselves tell you exactly how they index and why. All you have to do is read the guidelines.