Another appropriate title for this post could be “fix it before you break it”. Although a proper written 404 page can help you out it is better if you redirect a user to a new location (301) or return him a page that says that the page did exist, but will never return (410). The problem is that a lot of web companies start completely over when building a new web site and do not really look at the existing site. The result is that once a new site has been released, the old links are rendered outdated and now return a 404.

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