IMPORTANT - vBulletin Cloud Suggestion - Error 404 pages

[kostenlose1]

Here is a suggestion for your developers. I really hope you guys can implement this feature ASAP. I have a website that has a lot of inbound links from random websites on the internet. Problem is if anyone clicks on those links that it takes them to a vBulletin 404 page that says: "Invalid Page URL. If this is an error and the page should exist, please contact the system administrator and tell them how you got this message." There is nothing else on the page. So a visitor won't find the value of my website by seeing my homepage. They will just bounce back away from my website which equals me losing valuable customers . Can your developers please add the code for vBulletin Cloud users so that the error 404 page redirects to the homepage? This should be an easy fix and only take a few lines of coding. Please other vBulletin members, please share your thoughts on this as you may be losing customers too. I called in to support and hopefully they submitted the ticket to the developers, but I wanted other members to share their concerns on this to in hopes of having a fix sooner rather than waiting for future versions. Thanks

[glennrocksvb]

I'm not sure if vB Cloud allows site owners to change phrases but if it does, you can modify the invalid_page_url phrase var to change the error message and add a link to the homepage. You can change it to something more meaningful like this:

[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Helvetica]<h1>Page Not Found</h1><p>The page you tried to access does not exist on this server.</p><p>Click <a href="/forum">here</a> to go to homepage.</p>[/FONT][/COLOR]

[kostenlose1]

Yeah I don't think it will allow me. But hopefully the developers can easily implement this feature. I have over 1000 other domains linking to various pages I my old design. So all the referral traffic isn't hitting my home page.

[glennrocksvb]

Based on vBulletin FAQ for vBCloud, you are allowed to provide custom translation to phrases.

[kostenlose1]

Thanks for the tip. I will look into it, but having a error 404 auto redirect to the home page will greatly increase conversions.

Even if you could just add a meta tag to that particular page like this
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://example.com/"> That would be great. Think about how many webmasters probably have old missing / deleted pages that are still indexed on Google or on random websites out there. A lot of potential traffic is hitting those Invalid Page URL pages. Before I switch over to vbulletin I would get about 160 hits a day. Now those people are barely entering my homepage. If you can pass this up the line to see who might know how to easily fix this, that would be great. Thanks in advance.

[glennrocksvb]

You can add Javascript to the invalid_page_url phrase translation to redirect to home page. Personally, I prefer to be informed first that the page cannot be found before redirecting to the home page. If you just redirect then the user wouldn't know that the page was not found.