Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t necessarily consider it spam. A lot of the time it’s not done on deliberately because if it were then people would return a 404. We do have a name for this at Google. I’m not sure whether we’ve talked about it externally before but we call them crypto 404s; crypto from the Greek meaning hidden.

So a crypto 404 is a page that looks like a 404 to a regular user but to a search engine it returns a 200 response code. There is actually a team in charge of trying to write algorithms to deal with those sorts of issues including these crypto 404s.

Most of the time it works pretty well. If you look for some phrase like “page not found” you can reasonably write an algorithm that says, “This is returning a 200 status code or response code but it still looks like a 404 page so treat it like a 404 page.”

The problem is people do a lot of really weird 404 page not found pages. There are definitely a few that don’t look like a regular page not found and they will still return the 200 status code so I wouldn’t claim that we can handle that perfectly all the time but most of the time we do have relatively good algorithm in place to detect these so called crypto 404s.

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As a website builder, I know for a fact that one of the most common headaches that a lot of website builders have to deal with are broken links.  Broken links are not necessarily out of carelessness as most of the time, they are a result of editing your site’s page file names which in turn changes that file name’s URL. If the previous URL has already been indexed by search engines, it may show up in search results and clicking it will lead to a blank page or 404 (page cannot be found) errors.

A common example is when you change a page URL for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Once you change a page URL, the old URL will now lead to a blank page. If taken to a certain degree, these mishaps could even get your site blacklisted in the minds of your followers, leading to the demise of your site’s reason for existence. Search Engines do not like broken links too, and this could hurt your rankings.

Fixing Broken Links The Painful Way

If you built your site the conventional way, ie with an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, the usual approach to fixing broken links is editing the .htaccess file. If you’re not a web developer, I can totally forgive you for not knowing what that is. As a matter of fact, not all website builders even know what that is! And even if you can locate the .htaccess file, the text in there would look so gibberish you wouldn’t understand what’s going on in there and even if you manage to know how to edit it, manually editing each and every broken link is not a pleasant experience.

A WordPress Plugin To Save The Day: The Redirection Plugin

The major advantage of using the free website builder WordPress to create a website is that it allows us to install plugins. These plugins can be used to increase the functionality of WordPress, making it a more effective, reliable and easy to use website builder.

The Redirection plugin comes in handy when it comes to transferring pages from an old site, editing page names and URLs, or deleting pages as all these can lead to broken links. It’s so easy to use and you don’t have to deal with incomprehensible codes. It also allows you to effectively manage their permanent redirections, follow their 404 errors (“File not found” page), and tie up loose ends in general. This plugin can also provide logs of all redirected URLs, enable you to choose redirection methods such as redirect based upon login status, redirect to some random pages in your site, or redirect based on the referrer! Another feature I like a lot about it is it allows you to remove or add www to all your WordPress pages. In my case, I like to remove it.

If you would like to get the redirection plugin, you can download it from our plugin resource page. Once installed and set-up, you can sit back and relax. Your broken links will be taken care of.