anyone know what i should be expecting with 404 errors as a % of total pages viewed?

I would like to see the answer for this as well I have a very high % (in the 40's) and there is no way that should be - I came her brand new and fresh to - didn't transfer a site or anything and have never loaded something on my site and then deleted it. I was told by that I could have something installed that would find out what was causing the high % of 404 errors but it would adversely affect search engines and since I'm doing well in yahoo and MSN I didn't want to risk it.

yeah I think the 404 errors thing is pretty strange.

I got 51% 404.asp error page view for January.

I am geting the old "it must be your eB@y images" from .

hmmmm....can you 'type' in a frustrated tone...I think I am...

I don't see how it can be ebay images - for the first 4 months my site was live I didn't have an auction running on ebay with images hosted here and now it's only once in a bluemoon.

I have 8% of my page views as 404.asp for the month of January. I rarely eBay anything - just one auction this month.

I think these Urchin stats are causing way more confusion and stress than they are helping.

I am not clear on the 404.asp page error. Does this occur when a page can't be found and they get referred back to your index page? So a page that was deleted (which I do not do) or an image that is no longer there? What else?

CJS - wow! only 8%....see....now I'm concerned about my 404's all over again.

I have been given a virtual buffet of official answers as to what my 404 page errors mean. I guess I'll just pick my favorite and stack my plate.

Oh man - I wish I had never examined my stats.

404 is a file not found error...my understanding is that this should redirect to the index.asp.

Yesterday I had 25,000 page views and 13,000 of these were 404 errors (1. /404.asp (13,292)). I assume this high amount may be a result of all the changes I made to the site this week. I normally get nowhere close to the 404 numbers Im getting the last few days.

Does this mean I have dead links? Or does it just result from changes to design and link structure that have not propagated out yet.

If I have html seo pages that are high entry pages and these still have link designs in them to pages now hidden in admin, will this result in 404 errors? Can we create a 404 page or is this always going to redirect to index.asp?

Will the Eagles win? Ooops, got a little off track there.

I have seen some sites with many 404's however this doesn't mean that you will be redirected in index.asp. If you have an image and it doesn't exist it can throw that 404. If there are any dead links, that might also throw it...not sure on that one though...I will have to look that one up. But the truth of the matter is on some sites with 404's someone browsing the site will never see it or even think anything is wrong. Hope this clears some of this up =). BTW GO EAGLES!!!!!...oops, did I say that

Thanks Scott.


Thats really the key.

404's. They are everywhere. I just want to toss my two cents in on the subject, and I agree with Scott, Go Eagles.

404.asp doesn't really exist in the eyes of your customers. It is a file that will automatically forward any 404 error directly to index.asp, so the customer never sees that the file isn't there.

Now, as to why you'd get 404 errors. If you have images, or pages, or files in general that pointed somewhere and are linked on a search engine as to being that specific location, but they aren't there anymore.

So if I have 3000 images that were all in a folder on my site called "myimages", and one day I decide to segregate them more, and have subfolders called "1", "2", "3". The search engines will still have links to the "myimages" folder which people can come into, and those images are no longer there, prompting a 404 error.

Once the search engines catch up to your changes, it should even out, but before then, you'll have a very high percentage of 404s.

Thanks for the info Monstah.

Thats what I figured. I did a complete site redesign and moved quite a few image folders around, so it just has to make its rounds and get the se's caught up.

yeah - I was of the mindset that 404 pas the 404 page that comes up when a page link is broken on an HTML site.

Good looking out - I made TONS of image changes to my eB@y templates that were being accessed last month

hmmm so what was that before about the 404.asp file redirecting to the index.asp file - could this be why my index file THINKS it is popping out 5 GIGS a week...?

I was under the impression that 404's also are a result of a client not being able to load the page due to a combination of a slow modem/large image size ratio. Is that correct?

Thats what I was told some time ago...not sure if thats still the official word. But it seems to remain true to the concept. A 404 is an error page - many of us are used to the 404.html pages from old scholl static sites - page not found etc

But with the dynamic nature of s software they are able to save potentialy lost customers by redirecting them to the index page when they would otherwise follow a dead link off the site onto that ugly, unprofessional "404 ERROR - page not found" page

This is a great feature which can really help save your visitor from clicking into oblivian - but the 404.asp file is also powered up when there is ANY loading error - ie Images with bad src URL's. It continues operates under the idea that it should load the index page to 'save' the visitor.

Unfortunately it appears that it loads the index page on the server in the background every time a broken image link is referenced. I think is looking into a fix for that now - but until then I recommend everyone make sure they check all of their pages, and make sure you don't delete any images/files because these may be referenced off site, or be cached in a search engine.

Also if someone has 'thieved' an image from you and is 'hotlinking' to it - and you delete the image from your server - you just bought yourself some more bandwidth.

or ..at least it appears that way - we'll know for sure soon enough.

I checked some statistics just now to see what the outcome of resizing images and adjusting page sizes was. Two weekends ago, I resized all my thumbnails. They were previously 10-12 and are now 3-5. I also reset my site to display 8 products per page instead of 15 in an effort to keep each page down to 40 or less. (These two pieces of advise were given to me by Commerce. I just couldn't remember if it was the 404 issue that was the red flag...very short-term memory with me!)

Here's the outcome (and thanks for starting this thread, otherwise I wouldn't have checked this out until maybe 2007...when I could find the time ;-) )...My 404's were averaging in the high teens/low 20's (percent-wise) prior to the above two changes. My 404's are now averaging in the single digits to low teens.

If you think about how a 404 does not load a page, but instead reroutes the customer to the home page, what you realize is that this process only helps if the customer wants to go to another page that they can load and buy product through there. Otherwise, the products that want will never be bought by them because they can't load that page.

So, what I'm anticipating is that my daily sales have gone up since I made these changes...gotta go calculate that...back in a minute...

Another question...why doesn't Urchin show your category pages in the statistics? All my ppc ads bring customers there, but they don't show up at all.

My understanding is that the pages are generated dynamically and so they cna't be tracked individually... I think thats how it was explained - although - I'm not sure 100%

Well, I can't really measure this through sales $ or order count. My sales and order counts are just all over the map.

I had a feeling that's what you were going to say. The weird thing is...if this is the case, why is Yahoo and MSN listing these pages. I would think that they wouldn't even be crawled if they are dynamic. Google doesn't list my category pages...that I have found. Any ideas on that?

Maybe G00gle just hates us hah

Thats a good question though - it seems to be an ongoing discussion - there are merchants here who have had PR5 or PR6 on the main Index page, but not even pr1 on ANY of their other pages...haven't heard this conversation in a while but, it might be worth doing a search through the forum archives to see what the outcome of those conversassions were.

I was in that boat for a long time. I had PR6 on my main page and PR0 on my inner pages, but PR4-5 on my html pages. Suddenly a few weeks ago, my inner asp pages all got PR5. I guess it just took some time to happen.

I'm concerned about the load time on my site now and the large images causing problems. I think I need to optimize my site better and get the load time down.

SRG - keep those other images on your server for a while though - just in case they are referenced in a cached snapshot of your current page - you don't want to rack up 60k of bandwidth for ever 4k image you delete hah

Good point.

And I was just thinking this weekend about all the images I have that I dont need now. I was thinking of cleaning everything up, but I guess I shouldnt.

Its a good lesson about starting out your directories in an organized fashion...cause changing things later is trouble.

srg,
If you are open to suggestions...I resized all my thumbnails by just 10% and that took the size down drastically. I had been avoiding doing this because I really thought I'd loose quality, but you don't. I experimented with making the thumbnails smaller, but I like the 100x100 size and just resizing did the trick. If you can get thumbnails down to 5 each then you can put 8 per page. I have 350 and it only took me 6 hours, so it can be done quickly. I see some similarities with our two sites. 1) Within the category page you could reset to display only 7-8 products per page (use that 40 rule of thumb and change this in site wide settings), 2) your home page probably totals more than 40 (when I check sizes through Properties, I can't see the size as it display NA...but add up all your image sizes and get it down to 40). You may have to remove some of your featured products. Keep in mind how important loading time is for the home page...since all 404's take the customer back to it...you don't want to hit them with another 404.

Hope this helps.

Ok, I just found my category pages on Google - back on page 6. I'm at least glad they are on there. Now, I guess I have to figure out why my category pages are on the first page in Yahoo and MSN, as compared to the 6th page in Google.

Thats easy - there is like 5 bazillion times more competition on g00gle

well...okay maybe not THAT much - but a lot more competition

it is starting to spread out now with the aggressive movement of the M$N search

and Y@hoo seems to be working overtime on all of my sites - they must be trying to catch up too

But, there must be something unique to Google in regards to the category pages. I had a relatively easy time optimizing my product pages and getting my top selling products onto page 1 of Google. Problem is...my top keywords are my category words. Are any of you ranked well for your category pages on Google, I'd love to see how you've laid out your pages.

SRG was saying in another post that their homepage was PR5-6 for months while their catagory pages were PR0, then after months of fretting about it, and trying everything - suddenly overnight they popped into PR5

Not really sure what did it, but maybe its the whole 'sandbox' thing..whatever that is.