404 Error “Spam”
One of the things that concerns me about traffic to the blog is that lost of my referrers are hitting a 404 error when clicking the link to my site.
The dreaded 404 error is what a user will get when they visit a link on your site that no longer exists. Thankfully WordPress catches the 404 and gives a slightly nicer error than the generic one that is generated by the web server. It’s still not a great page to see and I know there’s ways (using plugins) to make it even more friendly.
I had a quick look when I got home from work at anything that might help me solve the problem.
Very quickly, knowing that other people would have had the same thought, I found the 404 Notifier Plugin for WordPress from the always excellent Alex King. There was a warning when I installed it that it had only been tested to WordPress V2.5, but hey, I like to live dangerously!
It’s a simple plugin that gives two options for notification:
- An email to a specified email address with details of each 404 error.
- A custom RSS feed with the details.
I thought it would be better to use the email option initially. Oh how wrong I was!
Within 10 minutes of activating the plugin I had 30 emails from the system with details. Some of the relate to a favicon but all the rest refer to an image that I had uploaded back in March of 2007. I removed the image because leechers were sucking all my bandwidth hotlinking the image.
If those are the only 404 errors then I am not too worried. I replaced the image on photobucket and re-linked it in the original post.
I have one other for the RSS feed for the “miniblog”, which is now Mini Mini Mini. I don’t know where to start solving that one as “miniblog” doesn’t exist and I have no referrer information.
What I would really like to do is find a way to stop the referrer (British Blogs) in the first place. I might contact BB to see if they can help and I will continue my efforts to solve the problem but any ideas people have would be great!
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