404 Not Found

A 404 is the HTTP status code a server returns when a requested page does not exist. Seeing 404s is completely normal — the web is full of broken and mistyped links — and having them does not by itself hurt your rankings.

The problem is not 404s existing; it is valuable URLs returning them. Audit for 404s on pages that have backlinks, internal links, or traffic, and fix each appropriately: 301-redirect it if there is a good equivalent, or restore the page if it was removed by mistake. Give users a helpful custom 404 page with navigation and search so a dead link does not become a dead end. Do not redirect every 404 to the homepage.

Senior practitioners distinguish signal from noise: a spike in 404s after a release usually means broken internal links or a deploy error worth investigating, while a long tail of random 404s from scrapers is safe to ignore. They prioritise recovering equity from 404ing URLs that hold backlinks (a common, quiet source of lost authority) and use a soft-404 check to catch pages that return 200 but should be 404s — which waste crawl budget and pollute the index.