Favicon.ico 404 Not Found Errors?

What’s With All the Favicon
404 Not Found Errors?

You can’t miss the favicon.ico 404 errors piling up in your log file.

Knowing a 404 error means a file wasn’t found I found this onslaught of favicon errors irritating to say the least.

Each time I saw one it drove me nuts as I wondered what was triggering them? What was I missing? What was I doing wrong?

So each favicon 404 not found error produced it’s own Maalox moment until I found out what it meant.

Luckily that bit of knowledge allowed me to reframe all those favicon 404 Not Found errors. Instead of seeing them as an indicator of a flaw in my site I saw them as a good thing.

Here’s why.

You see the favicon.ico 404 error is really

a quick and dirty way to track bookmarking in disguise.

That’s right, when someone book marks a page, Internet Explorer (IE) looks for the favicon icon on your site. So it can properly update Explorer's Favorites menu. (Oh and favicon is short for "favorites icon" - get it?)

When it doesn’t find it, that’s what generates the pesky favicon error that shows up in your log files.

While it only works with Internet Explorer it can still give you an idea of what percentage found your site worthy of a return visit.

Here’s the formula I use:

Simply take the total number of daily visitors from your site stats, MULTIPLY them by the percentage who use IE to get the number of daily visitors browsing with IE. Then DIVIDE the number of daily favicon not found errors by the number using IE and you can easily track what percent are book marking your site.

Pretty nifty huh?

And you’re right. This isn’t a precise down to the gnat's eyelash type number.

But who cares? I don’t use it as one. Instead I use it to track the trend.

If your experience is like mine, you’ll see that as you build content, the percentage who bookmark it will increase. If not you’ve got a problem.

But say this nags you more than I might understand and you want a permanent solution to eliminate the error.

Easy. Create your very own favicon. All you need is an icon editor.

What’s that? You don’t have one?

No problemo. Now you do.

It’s called GoldIcon and is offered free by goldshell.com

Stick the icon on your site and in no time you’ll rid yourself of the dreaded favicon.ico 404 not found error forever.

Granted understanding why you get favicon 404 not found errors isn’t going to skyrocket your Google rankings. But reading my eBook "Traffic from Google in 35 Days!" might. I've worked hard to develop a great set of tools and techniques. Plus as I did here, I explain them logically. Making it easy to grasp and start using them. So if you aren’t happy with your traffic maybe you should look into it - you think?

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