Everyone has felt the disappointment of clicking on an interesting link and getting the dreaded “404 page not found” error, but while it may be infuriating if you’re shopping or trying to read an interesting article, it’s even more frustrating when it’s your own page or website. Now, on one hand, SEO 101 says you have to fix all your 404s, but in a shocking turn of events, Google says otherwise. So, who should you listen to? Let’s find out.
What is a 404?
Simply put, a 404 is like a dead end where the browser can’t find the page or website you’re trying to access. 404s are bothersome for normal browsing, but they can be a big concern for some if they show up in SEO audit results for software like Screaming Frog, Semrush, or Ahrefs. You may be wondering if it’s urgent to fix them, and generally speaking, yes, fixing your 404s is a good idea, but not always for the reasons you may think.
Regardless of the 404 error itself, a basic principle of SEO is usability. If your website isn’t user-friendly or people don’t like using it, Google will pick up on that and send your page or website down the search page. It doesn’t involve penalties, but you might miss out on ranking highly due to a lack of usability. However, for the 404 error itself, things get a little more complicated.
What are the Different Types of 404s?
There are several types of 404s that might appear to you directly or in an SEO audit. The first type is an outdated link that now leads nowhere. Let’s say, for example, that you had a page with the URL yeseo.io/yup and you changed the /yup to /yep, but you forgot to update your links throughout your website. This is the traditional 404 error and it’s an easy fix that you need to sort.
The second, more confusing, 404 error appears to make no sense whatsoever, like your page not reading /yup or /yep, but something bizarre like yeseo.io/bigbunnies. You know this page does not exist and never has, but for some reason, your browser is telling you that it did. This can especially happen if you’re running a 404 monitoring plugin on WordPress. This opens up a new can of worms, though, because if you scroll down the monitoring plugins and see several admin variations or question marks, they’re not dead links, they’re hackers.
Still, these aren’t your hooded topple-the-government hackers, they’re more likely ones with software that scans hundreds of millions of websites daily, and those 404s are them trying to find vulnerabilities. But what should you do? Sadly, calling your local police won’t be of much help, but keeping your plugins up to date and installing a firewall on WordPress will do the trick.
This is very much applicable to new websites or younger links, but if your website is old with a chance that it might have good links from external sources that are years old, then it’s important to fix those 404s.
What are the Google Search Console 404s?
Another common type of 404 is ones that appear in Google Search Console. If you go to your indexing report, you might find a “404 not found” in the list of reasons why pages aren’t indexed. In this case, if again you see links or pages that don’t exist, then someone somewhere is fortunately linking to you, but unfortunately doing it wrong.
Should you worry too much about these? SEO research and experience say not too much. If you’re new to the world of SEO, it’s easy to think that 404s = ranking drop and if you ask Google, it might say yes, but that might be more accurate only if there are lots of these broken 404s. On the other hand, if there are only a handful and you can’t find them using your software, then they may very well be fake 404s.
Google employee Gary Ellis recently revealed that fake 404s that the Google bot might have picked up in the dark corners of the web “cannot reasonably be attributed to a ranking drop”. But if there is a large number of users coming through to these 404s, Ellis suggests converting them by showing them some relevant content instead.
How Can I Stop 404s from Hurting My Business?
Just like any dead end, the key is to provide a detour to another destination. If 404s are showing up in your analytics or tracking software, then you need to redirect the users going to these outdated or broken links in the first place. For example, if you stop selling a certain product, don’t just kill off its page; why not redirect to a similar product, or a blog post explaining why you no longer sell that product? This will not only give you the opportunity to carry on selling, but it will also keep the user or customer on your site for longer.
Summary
In a nutshell, there are many fake 404 errors that you can ignore with the blessing of Google itself, but it’s all about figuring out how many 404s are showing up and if they’re seriously suspicious. Still, at the end of the day, as a business owner, it’s easier to fix your 404s just in case and save yourself the headache, but if you need to ignore the right ones, it won’t do the kind of damage you might think.
Last Updated on May 22, 2024
