SEO Best eBook 2018 By Shahid Mahmum

could be a sign of Google testing different sets of results by for instance merging two
indexes where a website ranks differently in both.
You can achieve this with relevant pages, good internal structure and of course links from
other websites. It‘s far easier to achieve in less competitive verticals but in the end is does
come down in many cases to domain authority and high relevance for a particular
keyphrase.
Some SERPs feature sites with more than two results from the same site. Often this is the
result of what Google might call lower quality SERPs.
Create Useful 404 Pages
I mentioned previously that Google gives clear advice on creating useful 404 pages:
1. Tell visitors clearly that the page they‘re looking for can‘t be found
2. Use language that is friendly and inviting
3. Make sure your 404 page uses the same look and feel (including navigation) as the rest of
your site.
4. Consider adding links to your most popular articles or posts, as well as a link to your site‘s
home page.
5. Think about providing a way for users to report a broken link.
6. Make sure that your webserver returns an actual 404 HTTP status code when a missing
page is requested
It is incredibly important in 2018 to create useful and proper 404 pages. This will help
prevent Google recording lots of autogenerated thin pages on your site (both a security
risk and a rankings risk).
I sometimes use 410 responses for expired content that is never coming back.
A poor 404 page and user interaction with it, can only lead to a ‗poor user experience‘
signal at Google‘s end, for a number of reasons. I will highlight a poor 404 page in my
audits and actually programmatically look for signs of this issue when I scan a site. I
don‘t know if Google looks at your site that way to rate it e.g. algorithmically determines
if you have a good 404 page – or if it is a UX factor, something to be taken into
consideration further down the line – or purely to get you thinking about 404 pages (in
general) to help prevent Google wasting resources indexing crud pages and presenting
poor results to searchers. I think rather that any rating would be a second order scoring
including data from user activity on the SERPs – stuff we as SEO can‘t see.