Having a small website and query the databse each time some spider comes to the wrong url can be done. But having a large website with milions of different urls, its impossible to query the DB with some similarity function.
Designing a website without 404s
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#72I 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…
Why stop at fuzzy matching? Just pass the original page to ChatGPT, telling it to generate new content and Google will think you are producing loads of additional pages… no need to worry about duplicate warnings at all :-/
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#73I'm a huge fan of "do what I say" and try to avoid "do what I mean". Sometimes you want magic but most times I want just static and plain logic over which I can reason about.
Slightly OT but came into my mind when thinking about designing website related stuff: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#74Am I the only one who thinks this is a recipe for disaster?
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#75I 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.
Yes, I think this is a much better implementation of the idea.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#76Apparently the author also likes websites without content because it just shows a white screen.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#77I 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…
I hate websites that redirect URLs that should be 404s to something else like their homepage or whatever they think is relevant. My brain has to slam on the brakes and make sense of the absolute dissonance between what I expected and what I'm seeing, which is taxing. A 404 doesn't cause nearly as much dissonance, because the website is at least telling me why what I'm seeing is not what I expected.
Yes, especially when you multi-search and open links in background, only to see a bunch of homepages later and no way to restore search context to try searching it deeper. And then there are “special” sites that redirect to google.com.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#78WordPress 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…
Agree. When it's clear the content is no longer there, one of the big values of a 404 page is that you can at least hit Archive.org straight afterward to see if there's a version there.
Technically the 410 status code would be the correct one in that case.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#79On a not too outdated and fairly vanilla and permissive ubuntu/FF+ublock setup I can see the page load then everything clears. Not even reader mode fixes it. Probably unrelated, but the very basics not working makes me want to dismiss design suggestions right off the bat.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#80No. Do not do this.
You show me the links you think I want, on the 404 page.