Don’t Shoot Your Visitors in the Foot with a 44 or a 404
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
If You Delete Them, Redirect them! (Or else you are just shooting Your Visitors in the Foot)
One of the things that I have learned as an advertiser at Izea, is that bloggers like to delete their articles when those articles are sponsored. Not all bloggers, but somewhere in the 20 – 30 percent range of sponsored articles are deleted.
Personally, I don’t hardly ever delete anything. If it gets indexed, it is a source of potential traffic for my site. That’s advertising baby, and once the work is done why destroy it??? 
Anyway, I noticed that a lot of bloggers that do delete their hard earned content, don’t use any redirection techniques. They are basically dropping their poor unsuspecting Google Search traffic visitors on some nasty looking 404 pages or worse.
There is a simple tool to fix this if you run a WordPress site. Its called the Redirection Plugin kudos to the author of the Redirection Plugin!
Sorry Blogger bloggers, Your visitors are just hosed if you delete your content. I HIGHLY recommend you bail from blogger for your financial success and more importantly for the benefit of your visitors!
Here are some examples
The fancy way to drop a visitor on their head . . .
um. not sure what this is all about, but definitely not good for your readers.
In the Thanks that’s not helpful category . . .
This one is for those visitors that couldn’t figure this out already, ergo when the blank page doesn’t give it away
Then there is the skanky chick 404 images. What’s this about? Teasing your visitors for not finding what they were looking for, or trying to suggest they’d rather be looking for 404 porn?
Nothing says you don’t care like a default theme and a 404~!
My Favorite 404 place
In case you need to translate 404 into a different language
maybe its better or maybe its wasting everyone’s time
Even more problematic if your actual 404.php script is broken
maybe if it was in black . . .
