Citricguy

So this morning I decided to check and see how my 404 pages worked (should have done this a long time ago) and I discovered that my 404 page was a simple 1 line "Page Not Found" document. No theme, no navigation, nothing but those 3 horrific words.

20.1% of all my traffic resulted in 404's...

And even worse, after looking at Awstats I discovered 20.1% of all of of the HTTP requests to The Recognized Expert Marketing Show resulted in a 404 Page Not Found status. (Mainly because it took me years to discover vBulletin and vBSEO. All those WordPress, Drupal, phpNuke, Joomla, etc. links are all still out there! :( ) So 20% of my traffic was basically being forced to hit the back button on their browser!

So the fix...

Fortunately I ran across: Create a Custom vBulletin "404 Page Not Found" Page, and direct vBSEO to use it. written by Keith Cohen (Thank you!), which allowed me to create a custom (thematic) 404 error page.

But now I had another problem... Only about half of RecognizedExpert.com is contained in vBulletin, the rest of my content is held in a few WordPress blogs. I was able to use the Google Adsense Custom Search Engines to solve this one. (Added it to my search bar too!)

After a few quick edits of .htaccess I even had my non-vb directories displaying the new (correct) 404 page!

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
ErrorDocument 404 /expert/404.php
</IfModule>

I guess the lesson here is don't let your 404's go unchecked. I got about 20% of my traffic back and hopefully will even make a little $ on the ad-driven Google site wide search feature.