Whenever someone comes to your site and gets a 404 error, it means you’ve potentially lost a reader for good. Custom 404 pages can help in guiding someone in the right direction, but it’s more likely you’ve lost them for good. I track whenever someone gets a 404 error on robblatt.com with interest for this reason. I’ve always had trouble creating 301 redirects, because I know enough to only be dangerous.

I use Alex King’s 404 Notifier to create an RSS feed of all the 404 messages that readers of www.robblatt.com see. This morning I saw this happen:

This was just some of about 75 or 80 messages that looked similar. I can’t find where it’s linked to on the site, but it’s happening somewhere.

This is where the Redirection plugin comes in. The URL that is creating the 404 goes up top, the correct URL goes on bottom. This plugin will create a redirect for people who have no idea how to create one.