Handling 404 errors
404 errors (page not found) are critical to websites since they can result in lost visits, a bad user experience, and page-ranking loss in search engines. A 404 error happens when a page is not available due to an incorrectly typed URL or because the page has been removed. Besides the unpleasant experience offered to users that couldn’t find what they are looking for, as mentioned, multiple 404 errors may result in damage to the SERP ranking, so as webmasters, we need to prevent and avoid a wrong or unavailable URL being indexed by search engines.
Joomla has an integrated tool that supports webmasters dealing with 404 errors. This feature is called Redirects and it includes a component and a system plugin.
When the System – Redirect plugin is enabled, it automatically collects all the 404 errors that occurred on the website and populates the list of errors shown in the Redirects component. To use the Redirects feature, let’s enable the...