Where do I send my 404 Traffic?
 

Hi All,

I have neglected some very important small things since I've been concentrating on building free sites. Today I have some time to get a few of those things done and the first thing I thought of looking at was the 404 traffic, right now they just get the general server page for 404s and that of cause is not going to make me any money!

My own thoughts would be getting a hub done today and send all 404 traffic to it. I believe this would be a good way to direct them to some porn they are interested in. What is your thoughts what is the best way to convert 404 traffic?

Kind regards
Sodo

Sodo, there is probably as many asnwers as there are webmasters here. But for me, I set up a 404 page on my servers.

*redirect to your home/index page
*redirect to a hub/portal site
*create a banner farm type page
*create a 404 page using preset includes from sponsors (webcams or dating)
*redirect to your own personal "theater" type page from AEBN or Yappo Dollars
*redirect to a sponsor's tour or join

Or maybe just let it 404. Have you ever looked in your stats and seen a bot looking for domain.com/thispagedoesnotexist.html? Maybe that is for a reason. |badidea|

Maj. Stress, I might not be too awake here, but could you please cut it out in cardboard for me?

Would be much appreciated :)

Kind regards
Sodo

If the bots are checking to see what you do with 404 traffic, I'm going to guess they don't want to see any type of game playing. It might be better to just let the page 404 or redirect the 404 to your root index.

Maj Stress - Im not playing games at all with my 404 traffic. I have mine set to go to missing.htm, just how I choose to do it. With that said, the majority of 404 for me are usually from snooping surfers trying to find a naked directory or back tracking through galery01/15.jpg trying to find gallery02/1.jpg - I think i get a bit more surfer 404ing than I do bots..just my belief.

With that said. I don't set the surfer into CJ or pop up hell. Its a simple page, with maybe one or two banners on it and usually a dating or webcam iFrame. What was written above was examples of what CAN be done, not what I do.

Thanks for the info both of you :)

Or you could simply fix your 404s.

Nice one UW :)

I was thinkin the same thing. What to do with my 404 traffic?

On my domains I let them 404. I'll just continue doing that

Thats way too easy. But in all honesty, I only get 1-2 hits per week to my 404 page, but when they reach it it has a link back to my home page and couple of banners.

Years back, I was in an adult developmental group through Netpond. One of our exercises was to create a custom 404 page. I have a custom page for The Erotic Cove (http://www.eroticove.com/missing.html), but not my newer domains yet. I had fun doing it in character. And yes, UW, I do go fix my 404s as often as possible. Most seem to be from search engines following some old link or from the curious. As I just started a nice little 5 day vacation, I will be doing my best to do pages for those curious ones.

This is some pretty sexy 404.
Have a nice vacation Pagan. Don't work to much.:) Enjoy your free time

I think best solution is create portal with a lot of our |spam| sites (if you want this - just ask support :) and send your 404s traffic for increase your earnings

I would just create a custom 404 page on your domain with a basic 404 message and add some banners or affiliate links to try and monopolize it.

Redirecting to the index page is also an option.

There are traffic brokers that buy 404 traffic if you wanted to go that route.

It's probably best not to have 404 errors, but shit happens, so I figure I might as well have something up. I used a sponsor supplied 404 trap for a while...then some board members clued me in to the custom thing. I came up with this..:

http://www.lusciousdelights.com/wtf?

Not a lot of traffic, but it's there.

I don't have 404's because of missing links and content, just 404's from surfers trying to find more porn guessing their way through the urls.

Thanks to all for the great comments and your examples...I will go for a custom 404 much like yours LusciousDelight. I believe I need to drive them to my other niche sites, and if I make a page like yours they can choose from my other free sites, and then I'll spice it up a bit with some cam and VOD sponsors and see how that works out, It might also be a way to begin the linklist I wanted to build on these two domains:

freenaughtysites.com and qualityadultsites.com

otherwise It could be ages before I got an opportunity to get them started - in the beginning they would probably just work as hub sites.

And thanks again all of you! :)

Kind regards
Sodo |loony|

Now that is one supercool 404 ...LOL

I do worry about the bots not finding a real 404 though so I want 2cl0ak my 404 using php so that anything that looks like a bot will get a real one. Just look for explorer, mozilla, opera etc in the user agent and assume its human if present, machine if not.