Welcome to Video #6, and in this particular video we are going to talk about How To Setup an Error and Redirect Page.
So did you know that you could be losing traffic when people land on certain areas of your website that don’t exist. In other words, over the time and over the years of maintaining your website, you’ll have pages and elements, videos, zip files, whatever, that will disappear on your website. And what will happen over the years is they will be indexed by Google, and if somebody clicks on that through Google and they come to your website, it will lead to a, what we call a 404-error page. Now think about it for just a second, if you were that prospect and you clicked on a link and it went to a 404-error page, what does that first impression give you? Most likely it gives you the impression that the site is not maintained, or maybe it’s not really very professional. In that case what it’ll do is it’ll be detrimental to your reputation. So you don’t want that. Instead what you want is you want people to be redirected to either a page that actually works or specific page that you want all the traffic to be redirected to. And this is where the 404-error page comes in. Fortunately, on the cPanel hosting panel you can actually specify where you want all this traffic to go.
So in another words, what if you could redirect all that traffic back to either the main page or a working area of your website. That’s what you can do and in this video we are going to show you how to create that 404 error page. And we’ll talk about the other types of error pages as well.
So what you want to do is find the title that says Error Pages. So don’t worry about the icon, we can even do search on that, so we can do a search on error, there we go. That’s not the metrics though, it’s not going to be under there, it’s going to be Error Pages. Or it might be 404 pages. So we have Edit Common Error Codes or Show All HTTP Error Code. The 404 is the one that’s not found. So that’s what we’re talking about any time we delete a file or a page or anything like that, that’s generally where somebody’s going to come in to access your site, from Google or site that’s been indexed. And the next thing after that is to enter some HTML code that tells the system to redirect to whatever page that you decide.
Now I’m not going to expect you to understand HTML code, I can go through here and tell you to pause it and just copy it, you can do that, or you can simply go to google.com and do a search for html meta redirect, get the code and then just enter the code as you can see here. And sometimes you’ll have stuff in the body, you can remove that, you can change the title, but basically it’s HTML, there’s the head, there’s the title, and there’s the meta head body. So you can pause the video and just do that or do the other way, but just make sure that when it says meta refreshed content = 0. 0 means that it will redirect immediately, if there’s like a number in there it will wait how many seconds, so if there’s number 5 in there, it will wait 5 seconds before it actually redirects. And then of course as you can see here, I’m telling it to redirect to google.com, but in your case it’s going to be http://yourdomain.com. And that’s what it’s going to be and then when you are done you click on Save, and anytime anyone goes to yourdomain.com/somerandom URL and instead of going to an error page, they are redirected to your main page or whatever URL that you want to redirect them to. And that’s it.
