The Golden Hat

Microsoft Live Search released a pretty cool tool today. For those of you who own or manage sites that have hundreds or thousands of pages, it’s likely that you have broken pages existing somewhere in the site taxonomy. As a user there is nothing more frustrating than clicking on the link to a page that should have presented the information you’re looking for, but instead gave you this standard IE 404 Error Page.

As MSN Live puts it in their Windows Live Dev blog, “With Microsoft’s Web Page Error Toolkit, you can create dynamic 404 pages that contain customized error messages along with search results seeded with relevant keywords to help your users move past the missing page and find the information they need.” It’s a clever idea, I must admit. It gives MSN an opportunity to further promote Live Search in the search space and may potentially act as another venue for paid advertising. This is a sample of what a custom 404 page could look like:

If you’re running a large website, however, you’re not only likely to have broken pages out there somewhere but you’re likely generating income with your website as well. If you’re generating income then you obviously want a stellar Customer Engagement Metric. Think of this metric (CEM) as quality time a site visitor spends with your site. How long they stay on your site, and the number of pages they choose to “engage” are all valuable measures when maintaining a large site, especially one that generates revenue. My concern for those large site owners who drive revenue with their online space is in regards to the search results offered by the Custom 404 Tool that MSN Live offers. The potential exists for your competitors to show up in the search results shown in the 404 page generated by Live’s Toolkit, taking traffic from your site and pushing users towards your competitor’s. After all, if the user expected to find what they were looking for by clicking on your page, wouldn’t they be intrigued to click on another search result (potentially your competitors) if it appeared to offer what they wanted?

This is up for “draw a line in the sand” debate though. As a user, of course I’m appreciative of such a custom 404 page as opposed to a standard 404 error page. Yet as a large site owner or manager I’d be weary about the consequences of giving your users alternative results.

For the amount of time and energy it takes to implement the MSN Toolkit I would instead recommend checking out site crawlers such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth that can tell you information about broken links and page statuses and do some investigation of your own. Once you identify any broken pages then work with your tech folks and web serving to implement some 301 redirects or draft up a custom 404 trapping page of your own. The page can be a simple HTML page with site navigation similar to your sitemap page and offer users a chance to re-navigate your site and find what they were looking for.

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