How many times a month do you change a filename, remove or add a directory, or delete a thumb gallery concept that just didn’t work? Are you throwing away traffic visiting your site? I’d say absolutely! Why? Because while you are doing all of these things, the search engine spiders have been playing a terrible joke on you! They slowly but surely spidered your hard work, then indexed it for surfers to see, but now it’s gone ~ renamed, moved, or deleted!
It’s not always the search engines, either! Someone saw your site the other night and told their buddies at work the following day, Joe Schmoe can’t remember the exact URL after he’s had a few beers, and he isn’t exactly the best typist anyway.How many times a month do you change a filename, remove or add a directory, or delete a thumb gallery concept that just didn’t work? Are you throwing away traffic visiting your site? I’d say absolutely! Why? Because while you are doing all of these things, the search engine spiders have been playing a terrible joke on you! They slowly but surely spidered your hard work, then indexed it for surfers to see, but now it’s gone ~ renamed, moved, or deleted!
It’s not always the search engines, either! Someone saw your site the other night and told their buddies at work the following day, Joe Schmoe can’t remember the exact URL after he’s had a few beers, and he isn’t exactly the best typist anyway. Joe Schoe enters what he thinks is the right URL and is greeted with “Error 404 – FILE NOT FOUND!” You just blew it! That hit was from the surfer with a credit card taped to his monitor, just looking for something different!
How do you recapture this errant web traffic and turn those missed hits into cash? .htaccess! This is a simple text file named [DOT] htaccess (all lowercase, nothing in front of the dot, no “.txt” extension on end) that can be easily uploaded to your server’s domain root directory and may result in you actually being able to cover your bandwidth costs for the month! These files can be used to protect your site’s content, or return a user specified URL in response to a server error. The example below will re-direct the resulting error code to the URL of your choice, allowing you to stop throwing out trash, and turn it into Cash!
———- CUT HERE ————
ErrorDocument 302 http://CHANGE LINK!
ErrorDocument 403 http://CHANGE LINK!
ErrorDocument 404 http://CHANGE LINK!
ErrorDocument 408 http://CHANGE LINK!
ErrorDocument 500 http://CHANGE LINK!
———- CUT HERE ————
All you need to do is make a file .htaccess in notepad, copy and paste the above code, and then change the link info. Send this traffic to your homepage, or to a blind link program. Either way, you will not waste the visitor who came in to your site by mistake.
