Do 404 Errors Hurt SEO? It is a common question that most of the beginners ask when they start new websites and optimize for search engines. At the beginning, your website has few posts and pages as you have less resources but as time gone, your site too adds to new web resources. Most of the small sites having less than 500 URLs have less 404 not found errors which you can control and manage without hiring a SEO specialist or SEO consultant. As the volume of resources are few, you can manage 404 errors. Here, you need not to be anxious about 404s hurting SEO.
But for the webmasters who have sites having more than 1000 or more URLs, it is not so easy to manage 404s. You can fix your errors on 404 pages but you need to spend more time and tools to minimize 404 error impact on SEO. Developing and launching a site is not a hard task now as there are plenty of CMS for websites and digital projects. But when it comes to management, growth, crawling and indexing by search engine bots, you have to take into account all the aspects of your site including those which increase your site’s visibility and also the reverse of it like which factors affect your site negatively.
That’s why many visitors ask:
- Are 404 errors bad for SEO?
- How 404 errors impact SEO?
The current article gives you a complete overview on it. In the web industries, you can find a lot of answers on it as to how 404 errors hurt SEO. There exists a lot of debates on how 404 errors impact SEO, crawling and ranking of your site.
“It is true that 404 errors hurt SEO but they have varying degree of importance and locations. Based on the level of occurrence, you can determine how 404s affect your site”-
Page Contents
What Is 404 Not Found?
Want to know what is 404 not found? 404 not found error is an HTTP error code which the servers send to the browsers while cannot find a page requested by the user agents(browsers, clients, devices etc). You must have noticed such kind of errors while browsing over web pages or resources to find out your queries through Google. Internet is a great repository of web resources and nowadays most of the people depend on it to find out certain information or data. Here, millions of sites linked to each others for mutual co-operation, link building, growth, driving organic traffic and trust building. All things are ok, at certain time and occasion. But owing to modification, relevance or closure, certain pages linked to destination( now outdated or deleted) run into 404 not found error. Because the pages are deleted, URLs changed without redirect or the anchor texts linked to the hyperlinks are not managed properly.
Level of 404 Not Found Error
There are various level of 404s. They all do not happen to be at the same level and do not play the same role. Owing to varying level of occasion, you have to take into account each of them with varying degree of importance. To know how 404 errors hurt SEO, you ought to identify each one of them to find out their location. Once they are found and analyzed, you can estimate how important they are for crawling, indexing and ranking of your site.
404s may be both internal and external. The internal 404s are within your site which you can manage and control, as these are URLs linked to each others and stay within your site. On the other hand, external URLs are not within your site rather they have destinations outside your site. Both the internal and external 404 errors hurt SEO if they are not handled and redirected to on certain occasions.
404 not found errors have 4 level of occurrence like:
- 404 not found error in the living site.
- 404 not found error in the old URLs.
- 404 not found error in malformed or mistyped URLs.
- 404 not found error generated by system.
Find Out 404s to Minimize SEO Impact on Site
You have to find out 404s if you want to minimize its impact on your site. There are so many tools free and paid to find out 404s. You can use Google Search Console to ascertain which pages of your site have 404 not found.
- Just login to your Google Search Console which gives you a lot of insights on various issues on your site.
- Click on Coverage under the’Index’ menu.
- It will show you both the included as well as excluded pages.
- Click on ”Excluded” and it will show the various pages and posts like redirect, submitted but not indexed, 404 pages etc.
So, now click on the ‘Excluded’ and you can see the pages excluded under various categories like:
- Redirect Error
- Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
- Crawled-currently not indexed
- Page with redirect
- Discovered-currently not indexed
- Not found(404).
Now, at the end of coverage page, you can locate the pages with 404 not found. I have indicated it with an arrow. It will show the URLs having 404s. Clicking on this lets you show the particular URLs with 404s.
” Coverage sub-menu under Index in Google Search Console lets you show the excluded pages with various categories including 404 not found. It is obliging upon you to mark those pages so as to minimize their negative impacts on crawling and indexing using proper tools and techniques”-
Also, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools to find out pages with 404 not found. Be it small or large, the number of URLs having 404 issues, you have to find out. Because 404 errors hurt SEO.
So, login to Bing Webmaster Tools’ account if you have submitted your site thereto. Once you logged in thereto, you can see the various menus like:
- Search Performance
- URL Inspection
- Site Explorer
- Sitemaps
- URL Submission
- SEO
- Configuration etc.
Scroll down until you locate the menus ‘Site Explorer’. Once you reached it, click on it and the menu will be expanded. Under the menu, you can see a search box as follows:
The search box lets you search and find out URLs of all types. Click on the right side of the search box to open the URLs listed on various categories like:
- URLs with redirect
- URLs marked ‘NOINDEXED‘
- URLs selected but yet not crawled
- URLs with malware
- URLs with crawling issues( dead link-http 404,403 etc.)
As you want to find out URLs with 404 issues, so click on the type labelled “URLs with crawling Issues( dead link-http 404)” and it will show the pages and posts with crawling issues owing to HTTP 404.
” Bing Webmaster Tools let you find out URLs with crawling Issues owing to HTTP 404 Error. Identify the URLs with crawling errors to manage properly. There may be various errors but your first priority should be on 404s, as the pages with 404 errors hurt SEO”-
How Internal 404 Errors Hurt SEO?
So far you have learnt how to find out pages with 404 not found. You have to find out URLs with 404s because you can’t fix them until you identify them. To fix 404 not found errors is necessary to avoid negative impact on site’s ranking and indexing.
Let’s now discuss how internal 404 errors hurt SEO. But what is internal 404 errors? Your website has posts and pages. You are the owner of these resources. Now, these pages may encounter 404 crawling issues provided that you change or delete the URLs but do not use proper redirect.
In internal 404s, you can minimize its impact on crawling more than external ones. Here, everything is at your hand. If anything goes wrong, you can correct or modify it. In the diagram, you can see that certain pages were interlinked to each others but the links and the URLs were changed, moved or deleted. As a result, the pages linked to each others result in 404 not found when searched on search engines through browsers or the links clicked.
What to do if certain pages indexed in Google but deleted or URLs changed? Google crawls and indexes only those pages which are declared canonical and fetched successfully. Google does not index those pages which are with 404 not found issues. As you can see, in the Google search console coverage report that pages with 404s are excluded. Once a page excluded from indexing, it will not appear in search result pages(SERPs).
Pages which are already submitted, crawled and indexed will appear in the search results but if they are deleted, modified or moved to new URLs will result in 404 not found. In such kind of occurrence, you can manage the pages as follows:
- Login to your Google Search console and locate the menu labelled” Removals”.
- Click on ‘Removals’ and takes you to the ‘Removal page’ where you can submit requests to remove pages from your Search Console. You can use both the (1) Temporary Removal and (2) Outdated Content. Choose either one of these. Place the URL of the page in the field provided.
Once the URL placed in the field, click next.
For permanent removal you can either delete or remove the page from your site. Also, you can enable “NO INDEX” in the Robots meta section to prevent a page from indexing by search engines.
You can enable ‘NO INDEX’ tag in Robots Meta using one of the popular WordPress SEO Plugins like Rank Math or Yoast .
“Enabling ‘NO INDEX’ tag in Robots Meta prevents a page from indexing by search engines and thus the page is excluded from crawling and indexing”
Indeed! 404 errors hurt SEO, crawling and ranking of your site. Would you not like to minimize its negative impact on your site? Yeah, everyone wants that. That’s why check the ‘NO INDEX’ meta tag if you want to permanently block your page from indexing.
Have you submitted your site to Bing Webmaster Tools? Many site owners and bloggers use it too to submit their site, as it is one of the top search engines in the world. You can use Bing Webmaster Tools too to fix crawling issues linked to 404s if you submitted your site thereto.
Login to your account in Bing Webmaster Tools and you can see there several menus in the vertical menu bar. Scroll down the menu bar until you locate the ‘Configuration’ menu. Click on it to let it expand. Once it is expanded, you can see a sub-menu labelled ‘ Block URLs‘.
Click on ‘Block URLs‘ and it takes you to the next location where you can add a particular page or post in order to prevent from appearing in Bing Search Results.
So, click on the horizontal section labelled ” Add URL to block”. Once you have clicked on it, it takes you to the next section to add URLs. It looks like this:
Type the targeted URL that you want to prevent from appearing in Bing search result in the horizontal box, choose the URL type, Block type and click submit.
Thus you fix crawling and indexing issues of pages linked with 404s under your Bing Webmaster Tools’ account.
“404 errors hurt SEO if you don’t manage the pages linked to such kind of errors. You need to apply this strategy if you don’t want to remove, delete or redirect the pages”
Another way to minimize 404 error impact on SEO is to install a WordPress Redirect plugin and redirect the affected old URLs to new ones. It results in better user experience. You know that something is better than nothing. So, instead of 404 not found, you can redirect visitors to some relevant pages. If the visitors find out what they are searching for, will not leave your site rather they will come back. So, I recommend to apply WordPress redirect to certain posts and pages to drive organic traffic. It boosts your site’s ranking and reduces negative impact of 404s.
How External 404 Errors Hurt SEO?
Another query about crawling and indexing is how external 404 errors hurt SEO? When this issue is within your site, you can control and manage as you like. But for external 404s and their impact on site, you need to fix them separately. Many a times, you need to link to some external pages or relevant resources while you are writing a post. Referring to some relevant external links is a good practice when it comes to SEO strategy. Every blogger does this .
But the matter of fact is that sometimes these external pages where you have linked to are either deleted or moved to new locations. If that happens to be true without 301 redirect, when visitors click on the hyperlinks result in 404 not found issues. It’s annoying to the visitors. You have to take care of your external links where you have linked your site.
To find out broken links on your site, you need to run audit on your site. There are many free and premium tools to find broken links on your site. You can use Ahrefs to check broken links. It is a great tool for link analysis.
Enter the domain into the field and click on ‘Check broken links’. It shows you all the broken links on your site. If the external URLs where you have linked backed are 404s, remove the links and link to new resources relevant to your topics. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is another tool which you can use to analyze links on your site.
Go through the following topics and you can estimate how 404 errors hurt SEO, crawling and ranking. Blizzardpress conducted a study on 404s and published an article on it.
- They fixed 1000 broken links linked to images.
- 100 resources corrected using 301 redirects.
- Several dozen of internal links fixed.
The whole study was conducted on 286 keywords. After a week, the site moved up 1713 spots.
404 pages hurt SEO, ranking, traffic as well as revenues. It is one of the factors which negatively affect your site in terms of crawling, indexing and ranking.
A study reports that about 73.72% visitors facing 404 not found errors will leave your site and never come back again. The same report says that 79% customers are unwilling to come back to a site to purchase when they become dissatisfied owing to website performance. So, we can say that there is no doubt 404 errors hurt SEO and the ecommerce sites are the worst victims of it.
Your website contributes to 17.58% of the broken links linked to 404s. Search engines account for 6% of 404s while social networks and referrals contribute 30%. Emails, Bookmarks, Typos and Direct links or sources account for 30% of the 404s.
That said, search engine based 404s have the least impact on SEO and your 404s from your website too hurt SEO. When contents are shared with social networks, they result in 404s if the links are broken or deleted. No matter to worry about 404s though they may appear in certain occasions. Search engines are the most important sources of driving organic traffic to your site. So you should look into your Google Search Console and fix the crawling issues.
404 errors hurt SEO but they do not account for Google penalty if the numbers are not too high. However, visitors don’t expect such kind of errors. That’s why using redirect to relevant resources is a good SEO practice to result in better user experience.
Is It Good to Redirect 404 Pages to Home Page?
To avoid 404 error impact on SEO, many website owners build 404 custom pages and some others redirect these to their home page. Of course, you have understood that resulting in 404s is very annoying to the visitors but it may appear, all of a sudden, in certain pages or resources. So, many readers ask can we redirect 404 pages to home page.
It is a frequently asked question that deserves a proper answer. A website has both the internal as well as external links. Now, the visitors may encounter 404 not found error when the searched pages or the hyperlinks are deleted, moved or malformed. The pages and resources linked to 404s may be of various types. Redirecting them is better than resulting in nothing.
That’s why some bloggers and webmasters redirect 404 pages to their homepages. Redirecting is, no doubt, a good practice but it begs the question of whether it is good to redirect to home page or rather relevant resources. There are strong debates on it among the experts. Some experts say that redirecting 404s to home page is better than leaving them to nothing. I too comply with this because most of the visitors browse over the Internet to find out something which are expected to them. If they find out what they are searching for, they may return to your site again. But if the queries result in 404s, they will not like it. It will be annoying to them. That’s why some people say, “Something is better than nothing”.
Now, you may conclude that redirecting 404s to homepage is a good practice, as it redirect visitors to homepage instead of leaving them to nothing. Till now, what I have said are the positive aspects of redirecting 404s to home page.
Now, let’s ask the second question. Is redirecting 404s to home page is bad for SEO?
Of course, redirecting 404s to home page is a bad SEO practice. Because you use redirect 404s to home page to preserve link juice acquired by the deleted or removed URLs but Google doing such lets Google treat your home page as a soft 404 error. Google’s John Mueller support this.
Woorank conducted a case study on backlinks analysis on 1 million websites to check how 404 errors hurt SEO, ranking and user experience. I listed below what they had found on the case study:
- Half of the analyzed sites had 50,000 or more backlinks.
- 60% had gained 100,000 or more backlinks.
- 75% sites had gained 170,000 or more backlinks.
- 5% sites had more than 1 million backlinks.
- 12.2% of backlinks send users to a page that returns a 404 status.
- 11.4% of redirects send users to a website’s homepage.
What I want you to point out that redirecting to homepage is not a good SEO practice according to Google’s John Mueller, as it does not help crawling, indexing and ranking. However, Woorank’s case study supports that 11.4% of redirects send visitors to home page. 12.2% of the backlinks result in 404 pages.
So, we can conclude that redirecting 404s to home page is not a good practice in search engine optimization. However, it sends traffic to homepages. I always recommend to use 301 redirect to relevant pages, posts and products instead of redirecting to home page, as it results in more user experience,increases site’s revenue, ranking and visibility.
“Redirecting 404 pages to relevant resources are better than redirecting to home page, as they give visitors information similar to what they searched for”
404 errors hurt SEO, crawling and indexing. Visitors when encounter such kind of errors, become annoyed and do not want to return to the sites linked to such errors. Thus it leads to loss of traffic, lose site authority and trust. Moreover, 404 pages are excluded from indexing and crawling. Thus it negatively affects both the crawling and indexing of site.
