A 404 (Not Found) is the server’s way of saying “nothing lives at this address”. Every site has some. Products get discontinued, posts get deleted, and people mistype URLs. The status code itself is not a penalty, and Google has said many times that 404s on pages that shouldn’t exist are normal.
The problems start when 404s appear where something useful used to be, or where your own site links to them.
When 404s cost you
Brightside Dental closes its Eastside location and deletes the page. That page had links from the local chamber of commerce and a newspaper article. Now those links point to a 404, so the value they passed is lost, and anyone clicking through hits a dead end. Meanwhile the main menu still links to the old page, so every visitor who clicks “Eastside” sees an error.
Three questions decide what to do with a 404:
- Does the page have a close replacement? Use a 301 redirect to it.
- Does it have backlinks or traffic? Redirect it to the most relevant live page, or bring the content back.
- Neither? Leave it as a 404, or use 410 Gone if you want to signal it was removed on purpose.
Fix the links, not just the page
Broken internal links are entirely within your control and should be fixed at the source: edit the link to point to the right page. Redirects are the fallback for links you don’t control.
A helpful 404 page
The page visitors see should still help them: a short message, a search box, and links to your main services or categories. It must still return a real 404 status code. If the “not found” page returns 200 OK, Google will report it as a soft 404.
HTTP/2 404
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8Common mistakes
- Redirecting every 404 to the homepage. It confuses visitors and Google often treats it as a soft 404 anyway.
- Ignoring 404s that come from your own sitemap or navigation.
- Panicking about 404s in Search Console for URLs that never existed or that bots invented.
How to check
Search Console’s Page indexing report lists “Not found (404)” URLs Google has tried. Site Audit crawls your own links and flags pages returning 4xx errors and broken internal links, so you know what to edit. Broken links on other people’s sites can even become an opportunity, as described in broken link building.