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Designing a website without 404s

pillser.com

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Re: Designing a website without 404s

#91

Post by ryandrake »

mvkel wrote: post #50
lm411 wrote: post #46

I 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.

> 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.

This reminds me of something similar in the mobile world: Apple's App Review guidelines[1]. They're surprisingly clear and to the point. All you have to do is read and follow them. Yet, when I worked for an App developer, the product managers would act as though getting through App Store review was some kind of dark wizardry that nobody understood. Them: "Hey, we need to add Feature X [which is clearly against Apple's guidelines]." Me: "We're going to have trouble getting through app review if we add that." Them: "Nobody knows how app review works. It's a black box. There's no rhyme or reason. It's a maze. Just add the feature and we'll roll the dice as usual!" Me: "OK. I've added the feature and submitted it." App gets rejected. Them: "Shocked Pikachu!"

1: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#93

Post by dsizzle »

dazc wrote: post #65
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the pages redirect and have a canonical irl, there should be no problem, right?

There is always a possibility of a problem, even if you do everything right. If you are redirecting multiple urls to one page, for example, you may believe you are helping visitors reach the most relevant/helpful result but it could also look like you are trying to artificially boost that one page? Then there are the vagueries of a search engine becoming ever more dependent on ai where not everything makes rational s…

Do you have any evidence that redirects are bad for SEO? Redirects are a normal part of the web and Google tells you they are fine with it https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#94

Post by randomdata »

ryandrake wrote: post #91
mvkel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This reminds me of something similar in the mobile world: Apple's App Review guidelines[1]. They're surprisingly clear and to the point. All you have to do is read and follow them. Yet, when I worked for an App developer, the product managers would act as though getting through App Store rev…

I haven't work with iOS in a few years, so perhaps they are more consistent these days, but in the early days I built a web browser with a custom rendering engine to see if I could get it through review and it was accepted just fine. It was accepted just fine through several releases, in fact. According to the guidelines at the time, alternative browser engines (i.e. not WebKit) were prohibited. It should have been rejected if the guidelines were followed. But they weren't. It really was a dark art figuring out when and when they wouldn't follow them.

I'm with your colleague on this, at least in a historical context.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#95

Post by jamies888888 »

If you're going to do this then make sure you use 302 redirects (temporary) and not 301 (permanent). Otherwise browsers (and Google) will cache the redirect, then if your fuzzy matched URL one day becomes a real URL, people might not be able to access it.

Someone could seriously mess up your site by simply publishing their own page with many invalid links to your site, basically a dictionary attack, and if Google was to crawl those links, they'll cache all the redirects, and you'll have a hard time rectifying that if you were wanting to then publish pages on those URLs.

Also to reiterate other suggestions - your idea is not great for many reasons already stated (even with 302s). As suggested, just simply have a 404 page with a "Did you mean [x]?" instead. Use your same logic to present [x] in that example, rather than redirect to it.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#96

Post by teaearlgraycold »

Levitating wrote: post #66

This doesn't prevent linkrot but it can definitely cause it. If the author ever so slightly changes his algorithm URLs that previously worked (but were incorrect) could stop working. I don't see the problem that this is a solution for but I can see a couple of problems that this solution causes.

Not just the algorithm. If a new entry is added that ranks higher for a short URL then you will break the old URL.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#97

Post by randomdata »

spaceywilly wrote: post #13

I have to question how many people in 2024 are navigating the internet by going to the address bar and typing “foo.com/thing-im-looking-for”

I, for one, do that quite often where there is a consistent enough URL structure that "thing-im-looking-for" might reasonably be there. I expect I would use that method even more often if the likelihood of success was higher across the vast array of internet resources. It is certainly an ergonomic way to navigate the internet.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#98

Post by palijer »

ryandrake wrote: post #91
mvkel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This reminds me of something similar in the mobile world: Apple's App Review guidelines[1]. They're surprisingly clear and to the point. All you have to do is read and follow them. Yet, when I worked for an App developer, the product managers would act as though getting through App Store rev…

While these are clear and to the point, they are absolutely not an exhaustive list of rejection reasons.

Going through any forum thread of "reasons you've been rejected" and trying to find the reasons here isn't obvious.

I couldn't find anything in there pertaining to why we were rejected last month (mentioned Android in our patch notes as it's a third party device we integrate with).

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#99

Post by lilouartz »

jamies888888 wrote: post #95

If you're going to do this then make sure you use 302 redirects (temporary) and not 301 (permanent). Otherwise browsers (and Google) will cache the redirect, then if your fuzzy matched URL one day becomes a real URL, people might not be able to access it. Someone could seriously mess up your site by simply publishing their own page with many invalid links to your site, basically a dictionary attack, and if Google was…

I am still rolling this out to other parts of the website, but here is the new 404 page format https://pillser.com/engineering/2024-06-10-website-without-4...

As described elsewhere, here is how the new logic will work:

- 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

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#100

Post by wrs »

randomdata wrote: post #94
ryandrake wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This reminds me of something similar in the mobile world: Apple's App Review guidelines[1]. They're surprisingly clear and to the point. All you have to do is read and follow them. Yet, when I worked for an App developer, the product managers would act as though getting through App Store rev…

I haven't work with iOS in a few years, so perhaps they are more consistent these days, but in the early days I built a web browser with a custom rendering engine to see if I could get it through review and it was accepted just fine. It was accepted just fine through several releases, in fact. According to the guidelines at the time, alternative browser engines (i.e. not WebKit) were prohibited. It should have been r…

Doing something not mentioned by the guidelines and hoping it gets through, I can understand. Doing something explicitly prohibited by the guidelines and hoping it gets through seems like an unwise use of resources.
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