What is 404 error?

Today i will tell you about a topic of Search Engine Optimization. I am posting it because i were suffering from this problem since last week. It seems to me that i should share it with you hence i am posting this here. It will help all of you.

                                  Overview of 404 error page

The Error 404 "Page not found" is the error page displayed whenever client asks for a page that

is not present on your site. The reason for 404 error is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently deleted from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says "404 Page not found".

The 404 error message is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard status code. This "Not Found" response code shows that if the client connected to the server, but the server could not find the clients requested for a web page.

The 404 "Not Found" error is not the same as the "Server Not Found" error which you see whenever a connection to the destination server could not be established at all.

In code 404, the first digit “4” represents a client error. The server indicates that you did a mistake like misspelling the URL or requesting for a page that is not available on your site.

The middle digit, 0 represents a general syntax error .The last digit, 4 refers to a specific error in the group of 40x.

A 404 response code should be easily readable phrase which can be easily understood by human as per the HTTP specification. Generally, a web server issues an HTML page that has the 404 code and the “Not Found” phrase by default.  But you can also design your site’s 404 error page and provide a hyperlink of your sites webpage which a client easily returns to your website.

  

            HTTP Status Code

Whenever you visit a web page, your computer will request data from a server through HTTP. Even before the requested page is displayed in your browser, the web server will send the HTTP header that has the status code. The status code provides information about the status of the request. A normal web page gets the HTTP status code as 200. But if the server could not find a web page on your website then the server send 404 HTTP status code.