Pornographic ads (unless your site is a pornographic site) - You want to chase away your visitors fast, then include pornographic ads. Yeah, you might get a few dollars from them, but you will lose visitors and your site will not be "family safe", which can be important.

Gambling ads - I understand that these advertisements may be only things (besides pornography) that people will click on nowadays, but quite a few people do not want to be exposed to these things. I believe that these kinds of advertisements will cause you to loose a large amount of traffic.

Web sites that are just advertisements - I suppose there is a place for brochures or full site advertisements, but I personally hit back key as soon as I run into one of these. I want content. If I wanted this many advertisements I'd buy a magazine or look in classified section of newspaper.

Any large graphic advertisements. Remember one of very important things in web design is load time. Your site must load fast. If you include large graphic ads you are increase your load times.

Sites which are just lists of pay-surf, MLM or other money making schemes. There is nothing wrong with include some pay-surf or MLM ads here and there on your site. Including a section on these programs is also fine. But come on, please put some real content there also. Otherwise people will hit back key fast and never come back.

Brochures - I've seen a large number of web sites in my days, and one of ones that I click out of fastest is one that looks like a brochure. It feels just like someone took company brochure and converted it to web format. What on earth makes companies think these are of value to anyone?

Popup Windows - If you do a survey of web surfers, you will find that these are among most hated "features" that exist. No one likes pop up windows, and if your site has too many of them you will loose visitors fast. Oh, you may get a few more clicks or signups for your newsletter, but amount of time your visitors remain on your site will be limited and of less quality.

900 Numbers - Sites which advertise 900 numbers (a) don't work, and (b) clutter up web needlessly. My advice is to find something better to do.

Another useful thing that you can do is call a special CGI routine at time error occurs. How do you do this? Instead of modifying .htaccess file to reference an HTML document, make it reference a CGI routine directly (perhaps with error code as a parameter). This routine can send an email to you (and perhaps even page you) when an error occurs. This allows you to quickly handle any errors on your web site.

Don't get too stressed out about 404 errors. Remember that no matter how well you keep up your site they will occur occasionally. Even if every single link inside your site is perfect, other people will type or code incorrect URLs, thus causing errors. Some search engines have bugs and reference pages incorrectly and sometimes web server itself returns bogus errors. The best script that I have found to perform this function is Error Robot, available at http://www.newmediaone.com/scripts/

Personally, I prefer using a CGI routine to send an email whenever a 404 error occurs instead of asking visitor to send an email. This removes burden for quality assurance from visitors and places it upon me, where it belongs.

What can you do to prevent or correct 404 errors?

- Check links within your site on a regular basis. Correct any references that are broken.

- If an external link, say from an article, is incorrect, you can create a redirect page to move visitor from incorrect reference to correct reference. This is generally a lot easier than attempting to get author to correct reference.

- Check each and every 404 error that occurs and take steps to correct them.

Additional Resources

http://www.internet-tips.net/Surfing/404errors.htm The Dreaded 404 error This article tells you meaning of dreaded 404 error

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/htaccess_errors.htm Htaccess file - Custom error pages You can use htaccess to define custom error pages to trap 404 and other error conditions.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/maintlinkrot.htm Check your links regularly to prevent link rot Check your links regularly to prevent link rot.