Opencart SEO – 404 Errors and Rankings

Introduction

It must have happened with you, that you are trying to trigger a URL in any of the browsers, and in return, you receive an error i.e. “404 Not Found”. Basically, these are the HTTP status codes that are sent by the server as a response, in case the page you(client) have searched is not available or no content is available there, or maybe the URL is incorrect.

These 3 digits status codes belong to five different classes that are 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx. Therefore, error 404 belongs to class 4xx.

What is the purpose of this article?

The purpose of this article is to have enough knowledge regarding the opencart 404 errors, 301 redirect links, how to resolve these errors, and getting to know how to resolve these errors. Most of the time it also has a negative impact on the rankings of the SEO of any particular URLs.

These errors can be easily resolved and can be given a better way to present them in an appropriate manner to the customers.

What Are Opencart 404 Errors?

When the customer is visiting the opencart store, it may happen sometimes that the page they are searching for is not available, or maybe the URL they enter is incorrect or wrongly typed. In such cases, the server responds in the form of an HTTP code i.e., error 404. This shows that the page a customer wants to access is not found.

In the above image, the product page is currently unavailable due to error 404 Not Found.

How do SEO URLs work, resolve error 404?

The multiple pages that are merged inside an opencart store, every single page has a specific URL that is created by the store owner. These store URLs are created in order to hide the actual path and id of the URL. The admin basically has an option to enable and display the SEO URLs.

You can check below, how exactly the pages are listed from the admin end. All the product pages, category pages, CMS pages, etc can have their specific SEO URL. The list shows a keyword for each page available in the store.

These pages can be redirected to the exiting daily deals, offer and discount pages where customers can indulge themselves in navigating to various other products.

These SEO URLs help enhance the customer experience, appearance, and understandability of the page. For security purposes, the admin can also edit the URL for any of the pages.

The query, keyword, store, and language that are termed as information can be changed for the purpose of security or any of the basic requirements.

This is how we can resolve the 404 error issues and redirect the customer to any of the relevant pages or show them other alternatives to fix the issue.

How it impacts SEO and Ranking?

The error 404 does not have any bad impact on the complete website, as it is the specific page that is not found. That does not mean that the whole website will have a bad ranking.

301 Redirection for SEO

301 is another HTTP status code, that is responsible for redirecting a specific page that is not available for a moment. With this, the store owner can redirect the particular page to another active page permanently or temporarily, which will surely enhance the customer experience and store fluency.

This feature is most agreeable in case the e-commerce marketplace stores where some categories or product pages are not available for a specific moment, so there we can simply use the 301 redirection links.

That’s all for the Opencart SEO – 404 Errors and Ranking article, I hope you find this helpful for managing the SEO and URLs issues.

If you have any queries or requirements regarding this article, then you can mail us at support@webkul.com so that we can assist you for the same.