The perfect 404 page - Opportunities

Taking advantage of something that went wrong

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Custom error pages can be great opportunities. Depending on your theme and users there will be varying techniques and strategies.

For a store site for example I have been using successfully an apologetic sales pitch, apologizing for the missed call by promoting special priced deals.

Another site with a very dense .info theme offers related news and major entry points.

What's your call. How do you try to turn something that went wrong into extra value for your users?

[Shak]

off topic? [plinko.net...]

Shak

[incywincy]

my custom 404 is effectively a site map, organised so that visitors can easily find what they were looking for. it is more or less a duplciate of my main navigation page, it is of course excluded in robots.txt

[HelenDev]

it is of course excluded in robots.txt

is this necessary/important?

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incywincy - I would believe a noindex, follow to be enough to avoid trouble, confusion. Of course, if you call your page "404 error" and your description would read "Sorry, we messed up", you wouldn't want this to be found at a SERP...

[sun818]

Wouldn't the 404 code automatically make the robot ignore the page?

My 404 has a search form with the option to navigate if the user wants.