404 redirects

[Guidepost]

Hello,

I'm not sure which section of the forum to put this question in, so apologies if you think this is the wrong one.

I have recently put in a custom page for 404 "page not found" errors, and am also working through the list of pages generating 404 errors to individually redirect them to the appropriate page - quite a number are from duplicates which have been deleted, for example when a product appears in its "normal" place, and is temporarily listed on the new products page.

The number of hits on my custom 404 page is disturbingly high, and although this should hopefully reduce as I redirect individual pages, I wondered if there was any way of telling which pages had sent customers to this page?

Thanks,

Rosalyn

[Rich Brady]

GA should give you some indication of where the traffic is coming from.

I would double checking all of your inbound links, email/forum sigs, social networking sites as it could be a typo?

[Duncan Rounding]

DO your server stats show the referring pages?

[Darren B]

In addition to richards comments

dont forget your get alot of 404 from pages that dont or have never existed, these are caused by spiders looking for pages that have vulnerability in them, hackers looking for a hole.

If the others are old pages then these are probably comming from stale SE lists or base feeds and over time they will die

[Guidepost]

Hi,

thanks for your replies.

I don't use GA!! I am currently adopting a bit of a back to basics approach, and this is on the list to look at - could well be what I need to answer this question.

I will check incoming links as far as poss.

Re server stats - they show (some) referring pages for 404 errors, but I am assuming that now that the custom page is in place, they will no longer show as 404 errors? The server does not give referring data for redirected pages.

I wasn't aware of the spiders/hackers angle, so will bear that in mind.

Thanks,

Rosalyn