21 Nov Common Website Mistakes #7 – 404 Errors
There are many common mistakes made by small business owners online; #7 is not fixing 404 ‘page not found’ errors.
Hi there, folks. My name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com. Hello and welcome. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and watch this video. We’re in the middle of a series about simple mistakes, things that are easy to avoid doing when it comes to the management of the website side of your business.
And in this particular one, number seven, I want to talk to you about that horrible message, that error that we never want to see when we’re looking for our website, or worse yet when a customer is. And that is the message that says, “This is site cannot be found,” Or worse yet in Google search results, “This site may be dangerous.” Oh my goodness.
Now I package these two together because they are easily avoidable simply by monitoring what is happening with your website. First things first, “This site could not be found.” Oh boy, could be a problem with your website, could be a problem with the hosting, could be who knows what.
But you really do need to make sure you have a regular, daily monitoring process in place for your website. So that if it does go offline, you know about it hopefully before anybody else does. You ever had that message, “Dear Paul, I’m trying to get to your website, but I can’t find it.” It’s a horrible thing.
I have a site monitoring service which manages or monitors both my site and my client’s sites every single hour and will send me a message if something goes wrong. Now this is very interesting. The message I get sent isn’t to my primary email address at paulbarrs.com, because hey, if my website is not there, email is not going to be working either, right? So I get it sent to my personal Gmail address. Good advice for you to follow as well. Easy to do to set up a site monitoring service.
Next thing that you should also do is make sure that your website is being registered and verified in Google search console and that you get messages sent to you if there’s a problem with the website, such as someone is looking for your site online, comes up in Google search results, “This site may be dangerous.” Oh my, that’s a horrible one. Nothing worse than having someone email you with that problem.
It simply means that Google has found some malicious code possibly from a hacker or a bot within the code of your website. And while it won’t delist you from its results, it will show a message, “This site may be dangerous.” It will give you a warning. You don’t want that, you really don’t want that to happen, which means you need to have an ongoing monitor within your website which lets you know about these things.
Two ways to do that I can think of off the top of my head. One is, say for example I use WordPress and we have some security and we get a notification, but two is for Google’s search console, which will send me notification if there’s a problem. Now why do I call these simple things? Well, because they are easy to avoid just by setting up some monitoring processes for your website.
That’s it for this video, looking at the simple things, easily avoidable mistakes when it comes to the management of the website side of your business. Got a couple more videos to go, hope you’ll join me for those ones. I’ll talk to you again real soon. Bye-bye.
