The Fav Icon 404 Error

There are many people who do not know what a Fav Icon is and for those people, a brief explanation would be in order. When an individual surfs to a web site, there is occasionally a small icon up in the address bar of their internet browser. This is what is known as a Fav Icon. For the average Internet surfer, there will be little relevance other than something that is easily recognizable to identify a particular web site. To the web site owner and especially to those people who are seeking out higher page rank, there is one extremely important reason for including this little jewel on your web site and it has nothing to do with glitter or glamour.

Many site owners use programs such as Google Analytics or AWStats to check their traffic. Some web site owners will see a vast number of 404 or "Page Not Found" errors and have absolutely no clue why there are pages that cannot be found. While the Fav Icon 404 error is not by any means the only reason this error occurs, it is one of the most common. One of the first things the browsers look for when they are loading up a web site is this little icon. If no icon is found, the resulting error is the same as if an entire page of the web site had not been found. Again, this may not be a problem if the web site is only there for personal use or a simple, single page web site with a limited lifespan.

However, if the web page is an informative "authority" site, this little icon can greatly impact your resulting web statistics. So why would that matter? That error will also show up on Google and Alexa ratings and no "benefit of the doubt" is given to the site in question. The computer algorithms assume that there is a common error in loading up the web site and this will be reflected in the page rank and positioning of the web site on the SERP or search engines results page.

Granted, this may seem like a very small issue to most people. No matter how small it may seem though, the great Google will not care and its algorithms will deduct points from your overall score. This one little problem could very well be the difference between being among the first results for your keywords and being placed back on the third or even fourth page.

As for your web site's page rank, it could make the difference between having a PR1 or a PR3 web site. Again, that may not be a serious issue to some individual web site owners. Although, if you are making a living from your web site, you already know that you need all of the help that you can get.

The Solution:

A quick search on your favorite search engine will generate plenty of results for Fav Icon generators. A custom graphic can be used or even a favorite photograph in many cases. The picture does not have to be high resolution as the final icon will be very small indeed. In fact, most Fav Icons are only slightly more than one-hundred pixels and always square. Additionally, they will only be a very few small kilobytes in size.

For most web sites, the Fav Icon can simply be uploaded into the root directory and it should function properly. If you are using a CMS or Content Management System though, the process may be a bit more involved, though still relatively simple enough for most people.

In CMS packages such as Drupal and Joomla, there is a theme or templates directory. If there is a capacity to search the files on the web site, a copy of default Fav Icon may already be in place. Still, the icon should also be uploaded to the root directory in addition to the themes or template folder. By doing this, if someone does come across one of the error pages or other pages outside of the CMS, the Fav Icon will still appear and the resulting errors will be decreased.

The concepts of SEO and SEM or Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing may seem difficult, there are always small details that even the most novice web site owner can use to decrease problems and increase page rank. This is only one small issue, but when enough small problems are solved, bigger problems seem to dissipate as well.