With the new incarnation of NateBal.com one of my many upgrades were custom error pages that didn’t just have redirect code that spit you back to my homepage. My custom error pages are set up with links to some of my more popular posts and categories. Rather than just spitting my users back to my homepage using:
meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
Your 404 pages can be powerful traffic tools if you let them. After I deleted a post I noticed I was getting a number of errors showing up in AWStats. Realizing that my users were hitting my 404 more often got me thinking I should maybe add some links here to more popular parts of my blog.
Since the addition of these pages I’ve noticed a sharp incline in users as well as them staying for a longer duration. It’s quick, easy and it works!
Check out a sample error page here. From here you have the option to go back where you came from, return to my homepage or visit a list of my top 10 posts. My top 10 posts are then dynamically generated from a delicious link roll. It’s set up to display the last 10 bookmarks with the tag top-posts.
About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here. 
[...] I noticed after making some major updates to my website that my visitors were routinely winding up on my error pages. Search results from Google were off because I moved a section of my site into a new directory. So with my 404 pages becoming my most viewed it was time to change the content that was found here. [...]