I thought I’d play hooky from a meeting and talk about how the newest version of the Toolbar handles 404 pages for users, considering I see some public writing about it that morning.

We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: whether you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog. Here’s the part of John’s post that probably interests you:

404 errors with default error pages
When a visitor tries to reach your substance with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error letter (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will propose an alternate URL to the visitor. whether that is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs additionally listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools history.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, prepare certain it returns aftermath cipher 404. The composition of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a lost page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the subject matter they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer supply suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So whether you’re a webmaster and want users to see your custom 404 page, just produce your page be more than 512 bytes towering. I do think that that feature is really handy for most users. Let me give some screenshots to demonstrate what it looks like.

I installed the Toolbar Beta 5 for World Wide Web Explorer and surfed to a 404 page on mattcutts.com, and I see that:

My 404 page, while not that useful, is more than 512 bytes towering,

so the toolbar doesn’t change the page.

I had to look around a little bit to find a default 404 page. My former grad school has one, so surfing to a 404 page like http://www.cs.unc.edu/~sadasdf normally looks like that (in Firefox):

With the toolbar installed, I get that page:

There’s a few things I would point out:

- The first several urls all supply ways to navigate or search unc.edu. I’m offered the option to go to www.unc.edu, or www.cs.unc.edu, or to search on www.cs.unc.edu for some words.
- Note that the toolbar took my nonsense phrase “sadasdf” and segmented that phrase into a more useful phrase “sad asdf” to search for. For “mattcutts” it suggested “matt cutts” and for “mygoodpage” it suggested “my good page”. That’s really helpful for a non-savvy user considering it offers a search which may uncover the knowledge that the user is looking for.
- There is a “Why am I seeing that page?” link.

If you visit on the “Why am I seeing that page?” link, you get a page with more info, including how to turn the feature off:

I counted and it was three mouse clicks (click on a picture of a wrench, visit to uncheck a box, visit to save) to turn off the feature. Try to load a non-existent page, and I’m back to the standard 404 page that IE gives:

So my short summary is:
- whether you’re a user and you don’t want help with 404 pages, it’s very easy to turn off just that feature (or don’t install the Google toolbar).
- whether you’re a webmaster, customized 404 pages should continue work fine. whether you want to be certain that users see your 404 page, invent it 512 bytes or longer.

Bonus tip: Most of the public that read my blog use Firefox instead of Net Explorer. whether you want some similar functionality on Firefox, I like to use the ErrorZilla extension. It’s a handy little plug-in that gives you error pages like that:

I find the ErrorZilla plug-in really useful, even as a ability user.

Orginal post by Matt Cutts

I thought I’d play hooky from a meeting and talk about how the newest version of the Toolbar handles 404 pages for users, considering I see some folks writing about it that morning.

We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: whether you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog. Here’s the part of John’s post that probably interests you:

404 errors with default error pages
When a visitor tries to reach your substance with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error notice (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will propose an alternate URL to the visitor. whether that is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs additionally listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools explanation.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, invent certain it returns outcome cipher 404. The composition of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a lost page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the substance they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer supply suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So whether you’re a webmaster and want users to see your custom 404 page, just prepare your page be more than 512 bytes enlarged. I do think that that feature is really handy for most users. Let me give some screenshots to demonstrate what it looks like.

I installed the Toolbar Beta 5 for Web Explorer and surfed to a 404 page on mattcutts.com, and I see that:

My 404 page, while not that useful, is more than 512 bytes faraway, so

the toolbar doesn’t change the page.

I had to look around a little bit to find a default 404 page. My former grad school has one, so surfing to a 404 page like http://www.cs.unc.edu/~sadasdf normally looks like that (in Firefox):

With the toolbar installed, I get that page:

There’s a few things I would point out:

- The first several urls all supply ways to navigate or search unc.edu. I’m offered the option to go to www.unc.edu, or www.cs.unc.edu, or to search on www.cs.unc.edu for some words.
- Note that the toolbar took my nonsense phrase “sadasdf” and segmented that phrase into a more useful phrase “sad asdf” to search for. For “mattcutts” it suggested “matt cutts” and for “mygoodpage” it suggested “my good page”. That’s really helpful for a non-savvy user considering it offers a search which may uncover the data that the user is looking for.
- There is a “Why am I seeing that page?” link.

If you go on the “Why am I seeing that page?” link, you get a page with more info, including how to turn the feature off:

I counted and it was three mouse clicks (click on a picture of a wrench, go to uncheck a box, visit to save) to turn off the feature. Try to load a non-existent page, and I’m back to the standard 404 page that IE gives:

So my short summary is:
- whether you’re a user and you don’t want help with 404 pages, it’s very easy to turn off just that feature (or don’t install the Google toolbar).
- whether you’re a webmaster, customized 404 pages should continue work fine. whether you want to be certain that users see your 404 page, prepare it 512 bytes or longer.

Bonus tip: Most of the society that read my blog use Firefox instead of Net Explorer. whether you want some similar functionality on Firefox, I like to use the ErrorZilla extension. It’s a handy little plug-in that gives you error pages like that:

I find the ErrorZilla plug-in really useful, even as a ability user.

Orginal post by Matt Cutts