If you are a site owner, you are more than familiar with the dreaded 404 (aka “page not found”) error. For visitors a 404 page is usability stopping point, and accordingly, it’s an issue for organic search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. Ongoing SEO reporting will include a range of issues and while SEO meta tags are some of the most crucial details to maintain regularly on a site, many site owners may wonder where fixing 404 errors may be on the priority list.
What are 404 errors?
By definition, a 404 is a file not found error. These errors being so common among users that John Mueller, one of Google’s top Search Advocates, has stated how it’s normal for 30-40% of URLs found in Search Console to return 404 errors, especially for sites with a high turnaround of pages.
Often these errors are caused by the following:
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Typo, email, or bookmarks: 45.87%
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Referrals & Social Apps: 30.26%
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Broken Internal Website Links: 17.58%
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Google, Bing, or other search engines: 6.3%
Regardless of how active you are with crawling and cleaning up errors, these will generally be an issue for most site owners to address.
The Impact of 404 errors
404 errors are dead ends which means a visitor’s website journey ends before it begins! If you do not redirect 404 errors often and properly, they can hurt your rankings as well. As a result, some of your important product or services pages aren’t getting the interaction they should.
Some ways 404 errors can affect your site include:
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Increased Bounce rate and reduced session duration. Typically, when users come across a 404 error, their first thought would be to leave, ending the user journey. This not only increases the bounce rate, while dropping session duration, but it also damages the site’s SEO performance.
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Broken backlinks. Some pages on your site may contain high quality backlinks from other sites. Whether these are blogs, news articles, products, or services, these backlinks will attract significant organic traffic. Deleting or changing URLs could negatively impact your authority.
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Negatively impacting crawl efficiency. Search engine bots, like Google’s Googlebot web crawler, can easily exhaust their crawl budgets if there are numerous 404 errors. Overusing these resources could delay indexing to your other pages.
How do you Resolve 404 errors?
Setup redirects to similar themed working pages
Make sure you take the time to find a topically relevant page to redirect your page to – and not just point everyone to your home page. This will prevent anyone from accessing the error and ensure they are only reaching valuable pages, not only minimizing the error’s SEO impact but also creating a better user experience.
Correct the broken link
If a link is simply broken because you may have changed the URL (e.g. internal site links) be sure to resolve those at the source.
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Example: You changed the page name and URL from “/checking-accounts” to “/checking-account”. This page is also featured in the menu or linked to other pages throughout the site. While visitors are engaging and finding these errors, users think this page is gone and will cause a loss in traffic. You can change the URL back to the original “/checking-accounts” to keep users going to pages they expect to go. Your CMS may do this automatically.
Restore the deleted page
While you may not want to see the content and decide to delete it, your users may still be interested.
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Example: You deleted an old blog page that had low traffic. However, this page was linked to by another site, providing valuable backlinks. This other site’s traffic often led back to your site, but with the page deleted, you saw a change in your monthly traffic. Restoring the deleted page can reignite that traffic and reinstate your Google footprint.
It's important to keep in mind that it’s impossible for Google to stop scraping these broken URLs, even years after they’re deleted. Managing them at the source is the best way to maintain a user-friendly experience.
​Should I have a 404 page?
Yes, every site should have a custom 404 page! This is a great way to minimize the negative impact of 404 errors by keeping users on your site with accessibility to your menu of other items. Your 404 page should look like other pages of your site and minimally include:
Whether caused by deleted pages or changed URLs, broken links can negatively impact your website’s SEO and user experience. Don’t overlook 404 errors - address them promptly, follow best practices, and continue to monitor regularly to keep your site running smoothly. If you want to chat about ongoing SEO services to avoid 404 errors – and other negative user experience issues, reach out to chat with a ZAG SEO consultant.