One of the recurring tasks of the ongoing work of running a website is managing your 404 Errors. And a rather important task this is too, because it does tell the search engines how well looked after a site is.

On Google, you can use the “site:” operator to find all your site URLs in their index -

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.africanpridehotels.com

however, it does not show you which URLs are broken. Yahoo! have taken this one step further by allowing you to do the following, using the same operator:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.africanpridehotels.com

What Yahoo! provides you with here is a TSV list of your pages in their index and more importantly, they list the pages that are not found at the bottom of that list - therefore your latest list of 404 URLs that need your attention!

This list of URLs can be added to your .htaccess file with rules for 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) Redirection and that way you ensure the that your site audience, including crawlers, spiders and bots are able to find ALL of your content!

Thanks to Yahoo! for providing a full list in a standardized & downloadable format.