How to create a Custom 404 File Not Found page

[djbaxter]

Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations
Bing Webmaster Center Team
November 5, 2009

There are a great many ways for URLs to be rendered unusable. They can be mistyped or misspelled by the user, the page can be moved, renamed, or deleted by the webmaster, and the URL can be incorrectly written by external webmasters who create the outbound link from their sites to your, which is the most frustrating situation for the webmaster of the intended destination.

So when a potential customer of yours, interested in learning more about what you do or what it is your site has to offer, uses an erroneous URL for a page within your website today, what do they get? Do they get the Web's equivalent of the blue screen of death, a useless page that stops them dead in their tracks and forces them to move on to a competitor's site? Or do they get a page with helpful guidance that keeps them in your site, offering to assist them with finding the information they seek?

As webmaster, you control how you rename and remove pages from your site (see information on using redirects to point to moved and renamed pages in an earlier SEM 101 article). But you can't control the content of your inbound links, nor can you nudge that user who can't spell or remember your page-naming scheme (yet another good reminder to make the file names of your pages logical and easy to remember). So instead of cursing the darkness of silly users over whom you have no control, instead light a metaphorical candle by creating a custom 404 error page.

Full article including specific detailed instructions for both Apache/Linux and Windows IIS servers