404 pages are a natural progression of a website and they just happen. One thing that plagues SEOs is how to capture link juice and traffic that is landing on the 404 page.
Clint has constantly recommended making custom 404 pages for your website and linking to pages that have the most value to your site. This will direct people to the pages you want them to see, while also passing link juice until you can set up proper redirects. In this test, we see if a link passes though link juice in a 404 page with the target page url on it.
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Transcription below:
Test 547 is "Does a 404 page pass link juice when the target URL is on it. And I'm assuming that everyone knows what a 404 page is but I don't want to do too much. So I'm just gonna kind of trigger one here on digital leering, neaten kind of see. So in digital here, I have the custom 404page set up. My 404's all go to the archives page, and then that archives page has links to my latest posts on it.
In this case, the actually the order flipped around versus newest flushes newest versus oldest. It's going what you are, what we're testing here is do those links on the 404, page pasties. And the reason you would do this is let's say you did a website migration and you move like a site with 10,000 pages on it.
You set up the the redirects the best you can. And eventually at some point, you're gonna find that four fours and software four is coming from your backlinks and traffic from other people's sites or when Google has in there. And having a nice custom for four page actually gets the user engaged, you don't just go to there and see like in my case, digital years the archives were versus a nice custom one with the video on it and maybe some links or even the search bar, just some witty comments and stuff makes the it's engaging the user right away.
From an SEO perspective, can we leverage that and not necessarily always have to worry about redirecting the URLs to more relevant pages. Let's say it's just a page that you know, you had it before you're getting, get some backlinks on it, you're getting some traffic, but you know, it wasn't converting. So you never did a light content.
What you can do is optimize your 404 page and put your main sales stuff on IE, B things like your main priority services or whatever. So in digitalist case, like a link to the SEO page, a web design page and maybe the keyword analysis page. And then all the backlinks and anything that goes to things that are broken, or it will point to your 404 page, which has those things on it, will it pass juice. So Hunter sent that up for us. Using the indexing we saw here, you just pick this last one as the test page. And then we run through it.
As you can see, it's just kind of shout out to the number 2, and then went down to number 3, which unnecessarily isn't really all that bad. There's another page in here that he did it on, but it's same domains. And I think we're messing with filtering now. So the end result of this test was that yes, indeed that the links on your 404 will past juice from backlinks that are pointing to bad URLs on your website. So it's a good idea as a standard practice to you edit and create custom 404 page for your website in order to leverage that knowledge.
At the end of the day is really about the users, right? So you want to have some place for them to go especially if you are dealing with products and sales and service. Then hopefully that answers Susan's question. Why would you use 404 page put links on if you could put a link in any page. That's why because you're not always going to know where your backlinks end up from, coming from. Maybe you change the URL, all that stuff, you're planning ahead and you're leveraging everything instead of just kind of waiting.