I checked out one of my newer sites and found it had 3 backlinks I hadn’t created.

On closer investigation they were from 3 related forums.

Someone had posted a link, but it went to a page I haven’t got!

My guess is he got the domain name wrong he linked to

http://www.healthy-natural-weight-loss.com/cgi-bin/public.php.

Maybe the one he intended hadn’t got dashes.

Anyway that’s 3 free backlinks – all I had to do it setup a custom 404 page to redirect to my home page.

It’s a good practice to have a page like this or if any page is missing your visitor will just see an error message.

Before you do this check if you have an .htaccess file on your website

If not follow these steps.

1) Open Notepad

2) Paste in the following – if your index page isn’t called index.html then adjust accordingly eg index.php, index.htm

3) ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

4) Save the file as .htaccess [Note this is a file extension only – there is nothing infront of the .]

5) Upload to the root directory of your website.

If you already have an .htaccess file then:

1) Download the file [I’d advise keeping a backup of it just in case]

2) Open it with notepad [Right click and open with]

3) Paste in the following line following – if your index page isn’t called index.html then adjust accordingly eg index.php, index.htm

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

4) Upload to the root directory of your website.

That’s it – hope you all get some free backlinks and traffic too ;)

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Filed under: Alex Jeffreys Coaching • General • Search Engines

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