404 (Not found) errors are not to be afraid of and you don't need to scramble to fix them, at least not most of the time. A HTTP 404 status code is for cases when a URL on your server is not mapped to a resource, so from your perspective it can be one of these two buckets: the URL SHOULD return content and a 200 status code, or the URL was indeed not supposed to return content. This second bucket could be split further, specifically URLs that could be useful to users and URLs that are absolutely useless. So we have: 1. the URL SHOULD return content and a 200 status code. For example, you accidentally deleted the HTML mapped to the URL, or you messed up something with your database. You should fix these as soon as possible, especially if the URL is important to your users and thus site. 2. the URL was indeed not supposed to return content, which can be either a) the URL COULD be useful to users. You should probably think about mapping these URLs somehow to a piece of content on your site by eg. redirecting. Some cases I've seen that fall into this category are broken links from high user-traffic pages; the users tap on the link, they find a 404 error even though you have the perfect content for them. b) the URL is absolutely useless. From a user's perspective, there's nothing you should do about these. If you do, you just mislead them. Some cases I've seen that fall into this category is off-site links to content that you don't have (say you changed business and you don't sell surströmming anymore). Unconventional as it may be, you don't need to fix all 404 errors: fix those that actually will help users.
Great advice! I think a 404 is a 404: if the resource doesn't exist, you won't invent a new resource just to fix the 404. Now, I think for user experience, it's still a good thing to make sure links to these pages are not scattered around the website. One question, though: whenever Google sees a page is in 404, does it store the information somewhere so that it doesn't use useful crawling (and my server) resources by crawling it? If I can make sure I remove all 404s from my website, it might be a bit harder to tell all websites linking to these pages which no longer exist to also remove their links.
Hi Gary, quick question, I've been creating 1000's of broken links to all my competitors websites. I create a broken link on high DA guest post blog from the dearsirs website and link to a non-existent page on my competitors website. I then build 10000's of links manually using Fiverr to those pages so Google crawls them. When Google crawls those links they land on a 404 on my competitors website... My question is... Will they get deindexed and placed back into the google sandbox? If you have any more tips on ways to destroy my competitors, let me know 🙂
Gary Illyes 404 generate crawling issues - gbot comes to recrawl them. Why do you not recommend (in this post) to turn 404 to 410?
Ah, Gary Illyes , now you're ruining another easy SEO agency job code - love how people can argue with even the clearest message directly from the source 🙃
Also adding GA code to the 404 pages which isn't often done can flag when your pages are getting traffic from external platforms such as a paid media...
I think there is a further consideration to be made. Specifically, whether the user landed on the 404 page from an external source or from within the site. In the first case, I don't consider it a true error. In the second case, in addition to providing a poor user experience, you are also wasting crawl budget and the user's patience.
Probably a wise choice, nobody should sell surströmming anyways!
There's a lingering bad practice out there where clients get sold on the "cleanup" of HTTP 404 errors, helped by tools that facilitate redirecting all non-existing URLs and typos to the homepage.
2b or not 2b ... in the case of 2b, it's a good idea to have friendly 404 handler, telling people it's an error and helping them to continue somehow. If your website has a good site search, it's usually a good idea to make it prominent on the 404 page so that people can find something like what they were looking for.
Surely there's an issue of trust for users with 2b)? If you follow a link to a site and its a 404, it doesn't give an impression that you're trustworthy - even if you don't sell surströmming any more there ought to be something at the end of the link, even if it's just a link to what you're selling in place of it or a resource explaining you've changed business. Without throwing stones in a glass house, I'd imagine having any 404's is detrimental to users just because they're never *trying* to reach a 404?