Important Alert:
Summary: Understanding what causes a 404 error can help businesses fix any broken links and ensure their website is well-functioning, which results in a higher conversion rate and optimized user experience. This guide helps you understand what is a 404 error, the key concepts related to Error 404 messages, the types of 404 errors and how they can affect your user experience and SEO.
Key Takeaways:-
Encountering an “Error 404 Page Not Found” message can be frustrating for users and problematic for website owners. This common HTTP error indicates that a webpage is missing or unavailable, often due to broken links, deleted content, or incorrect URLs.
A 404 error message is the standard HTML code for a webpage problem. In other words, this means the server hosting your website is unable to display the page. While 404 errors don’t directly affect your website’s SEO, managing and fixing them is still critical.
Frequent broken links can lead to frustration among website visitors, increase your bounce rate, and damage your website’s credibility. Additionally, having a well-placed backlink that leads to a deleted page can result in lost organic traffic if it isn’t redirected.
Ensuring your website has minimal errors reinforces trustworthiness and professionalism. When you look at SEO more holistically, you see how big a difference it makes to manage the little details. One effective way to stay on top of these issues is by regularly using a website seo audit checklist, which helps you identify and resolve broken links, technical errors, and missed SEO opportunities.
Besides SEO concerns, site quality is essential for complying with Google Ad Grants and similar programs that require websites to be free of broken links. Failing to meet these requirements can affect your website’s eligibility.
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As a 404 error is quite widespread across a website, the reasons for the same also range from complex to simple. Some of the most common issues are:
404 errors may seem harmless, but they can have a significant impact on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). When search engine crawlers encounter too many 404 pages, it can disrupt the crawl flow and waste valuable crawl budgets, especially on large websites. This means important pages might be overlooked, leading to reduced visibility in search results.
Additionally, broken internal or external links leading to 404 errors can negatively affect user experience, causing visitors to leave your site prematurely — increasing bounce rates and lowering engagement signals that search engines consider in their ranking algorithms.
From an effective seo strategy perspective, addressing 404 errors is crucial. Regularly auditing your site for broken links, implementing proper 301 redirects for removed content, and customizing your 404 page to guide users back to relevant content are essential steps to maintain a healthy and user-friendly website that ranks well in search engines.
Before you can fix all your 404 errors, you must understand the difference between hard 404 and soft 404 errors. The signals exchanged between a page and a search bot can help you understand it better. Based on them, 404 errors can be categorised into two categories.
A hard 404 error is the HTTP status code for pages without any resources. When the server doesn’t redirect pages, search bots crawl through empty pages and receive clear 404 error codes from those pages. This tells search bots that this page should not be indexed as it doesn’t exist.
Over time, Google will remove this page from its search results. As a result, crawlers can focus on the pages you wish to index, making it easier to understand the intent behind your website.
To check your website’s 404 status yourself,
You should see the status immediately. If you don’t, reload the page.
On the other hand, a soft 404 error is not a genuine error code. Instead of sending a 404 error, the server sends a 200 OK signal to the search engine by redirecting them. This makes the search engine believe that the page is still running even though it might not be.
Some webmasters transfer link juice to existing pages from missing pages using this method.
But you should know, if your redirected content doesn’t match the user’s search intent, it can confuse users and search engines and negatively impact your business website’s visibility.
Here’s a comparison of hard vs. soft 404 errors:
| Type of 404 Error | Description | HTTP Status Code | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard 404 | The server correctly responds with a 404 error when a page doesn’t exist. | 404 | Expected behavior; helps search engines understand the page is gone. |
| Soft 404 | The page appears missing but returns a 200 (OK) status code. | 200 | Misleads search engines can hurt SEO by indexing non-existent pages. |
If you’re wondering how to check your website’s 404 error page, there are multiple ways to do it.
Search Console allows you to track 404 errors once you connect it to your website. Once you log in, head to ‘Page Indexing’ and then click ‘Not Found (404)’ to get a list of all the URLs giving out 404 errors.
You can check your server access logs using Cpanel (/var/log/apache2/access.log for Apache) or (/var/log/nginx/access.log for Nginx) to find any URLs returning 404 errors.
Open the developer tools in your Chrome browser. Go to the Network tab, reload your page and search for any requests that show 404 status codes.
Ahrefs, Screaming Frog and SEMrush are some of the web crawling tools that you can use to scan your website for broken links.
If you suspect any URL is broken, you can manually enter the address into the search bar to confirm whether there is a problem with that link or not.
Fixing a 404 error is not difficult, but it requires precision when it comes to the implications. The solutions vary depending on the types of URL or the cause of the problem.
To modify or delete a 404 error page, identify the source page that instructs search engines about the broken page link. Web crawlers and tools like Google Search Console can help you achieve this. Once you find the page you are referring to, decide on which action you should take based on the problem. If you have mistyped the URL, you can simply correct your link address. If the website content is not available, remove the broken link entirely to get rid of the message.
This can be done in different ways depending on the website platform you are using. If you have a WordPress website, simply go to the plugin settings to manage your sitemap. If you have a custom-coded sitemap, here’s how you can do it.
You might have noticed that several websites have custom 404 error pages with a little more creative messaging than the regular 404 Page Not Found pop-up. Here are a few examples:
Creating such custom 404 pages requires a little extra design and coding. The main reason behind creating such a page is to replace the blunt messaging that could drive users away.
The 404 Error Not Found error is, unfortunately, not something you can eliminate permanently. You will come across them from time to time when you migrate your website, create new pages or switch your code. An expert technical SEO services team can help you to consistently monitor your website for errors and recommend and implement the best solutions to avoid them. Get in touch with our team today.
While you can’t fix all 404 errors in one go or permanently, tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can make it easier to detect and eliminate them.
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