SEO Traffic Boost Confirmed from 404 Plugin

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Dec 19, 07

Announcing a major update to the AskApache Google 404 Plugin for WordPress, still only a 5 second install! Now includes a customized version of a 404.php WordPress template file and will automatically use this custom 404.php file if you don’t already have one.

Boost Visitors, Traffic, and SEO

Visitors who travel to a non-existant URI on your blog will be shown this super-user-friendly ErrorDocument and they will most-likely locate what they were originally searching for.

The second more experimental traffic driver comes from attaching your blogname to every search query made to each of the Google Search Indexes using an OR blogname request. My hypothesis is basically that every time a visitor sees your 404 page, a search query is sent to each Google Index. This may not sound very exciting, but here is why I think it is very exciting.

Increase Search Engine Ranking?

It is common knowledge that searching for your site in search engines repeatedly helps them to index your site and may boost your ranking, but 1 person doing that doesn’t make much of a splash. This plugin turns every 404 Not Found event on your blog into a SEO traffic generating event! Now you have many unique users with unique IP addresses and cookies searching for your blogname on all of the Google Indexes… Sweet.

The Real SEO benefit

Wait.. It gets much better… Providing highly relevant search results to your visitors is the highest priority for this plugin in order to help them find the requested resource as fast as possible. In order to that this plugin takes the requested URI and massages it into a list of keywords. These keywords are then used to query each of the google indexes, but to make sure the results are related to your blog, and to make sure Google starts to recognize certain common related keywords for your site, the blogname is also attached to the search!

Take My 404 for a Test-Drive

Click ImageTake note of the Link URI and what is searched for on Google. NOTE: not everything is obvious, some things are hidden.

Updated ScreenShots, Results and Plugin Panel

Search the Image, Blog, Web, Video, YouTube, CSE, and Site Google Index’s automatically. Using the Google AJAX API.

Get this useful WordPress Plugin

Demo | Download | Installation | FAQ | Screenshots / Video

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Reader Comments

1. Tyrone Campbell says:August 04, 15h
   

   Another great plugin that i am 100% going to use on my blog :) so happy i got forwarded to this place :)

2. gmonger says:February 01, 6h
   

   I just activated the plugin, I think it will be a big help in trying to get more traffic. Brilliant idea by the way. Thanks.

3. Mark says:January 21, 14h
   

   This plugin is both clever and FANTASTIC!

   Is it possible to integrate Adsense for search into this? It seems to me if we are driving traffic to Google, we should get credit for the ads….

   Thanks,
   Mark

4. Search Engine Spider says:January 10, 3h
   

   I also got a blog. Sure I will try this plugin and will Inform you I it does something.

5. Brian says:November 11, 16h
   

   Hi,

   Great tool!
   How can I call this script for other pages? not just my 404 error page?

   Thanks,
   Brian

6. Robert Irizarry says:November 11, 10h
   

   Great idea for a 404 page. But I’m wondering - how is the CSE defined? I imagine if folks already have one, they’ll want to use their own.

7. gestroud says:November 07, 21h
   

   Hello,

   Great plugin. One little problem with the 3.0 version vs. the previous version: The folder names are different. The previous version was aa-google-404; the new version is askapache-google-404. The reason I found out was that the admin section for WP plugins kept telling me that there was an update available when I knew I already updated the plugin. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that there where two entries for the plugin. One for the previous version and one for the new version because the folder names were different. Just thought I’d let you know. Beyond that, everything is excellent. Thanks!

8. AnHosting Coupon says:November 06, 14h
   

   this is exactly what i need. Thank you so much for the plugin

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