Earlier this month I had the opportunity to catch up with Josh Katinger, Co-Creator of Errorlytics and President of Accession Media. During our chat I was able to get Josh's insight on Errorlytics and importance of monitoring your error pages.

[Manoj]: What was your inspiration to design a product like Errorlytics?

[Josh Katinger]: Part of our business model is being a web development shop for various types of clients. In our years of managing websites for our clients we realized that one of the major problems that most webmasters ignore is 404 errors. Most websites get a lot more 404 errors than most webmasters realize, which is bad for website visitors and for search engine rankings.

[Manoj]: Can you briefly describe how Errorlytics works?

[Josh Katinger]: Through a script that you download and install on your server, Errorlytics records all the 404 errors that occur on your site. You can then log into the Errorlytics interface and write rules that will handle those errors going forward. They can be very specific rules for one specific 404 error, or broad matching rules that handle re-direction of one entire directory or group of pages to another.

[Manoj]: How is Errorlytics different than error page reporting found in Web Analytics?

[Josh Katinger]: The largest difference is that analytics tools only report 404s. Errorlytics allows you to actually fix those 404 errors in a search engine friendly way.

[Manoj]: What kind of insight are site owners missing out by not monitoring their 404 pages?

[Josh Katinger]: The thing that always surprises us is all of the strange bots and page requests that are made on a site. Most of the sites we track get requests for pages that never existed on the server in the first place. And if you own a site that depends heavily on ad revenue - which in turn depends on page views - by fixing your 404s you are preserving site visits and page views. Letting pages on your site continue to 404 is like throwing money out the window.

[Manoj]: Can you let us in on any enhancements in future versions?

 

[Josh Katinger]: We are planning on getting plugins for the IIS web server, ASP and ASP.net. We are also looking at a plugin for the MovableType blogging engine. We are also interested in rolling out functionality that will allow users to export and upload a list of redirects for bulk creation instead of having to create them on a one by one basis.

[Manoj]: How much does Errorlytics cost?

[Josh Katinger]: We have several pricing levels for all types of individual webmaster and large organizations. You can view our pricing on our sign up page http://www.errorlytics.com/sign_ups/plans.