\n site is… but, wait! The
\n Crawl errors<\/a>
\n page is full of
\n
404 (Not found)<\/code> errors<\/a>!
\n Is disaster imminent??<\/i>\n<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/kb-gorsel\/g-1a040af030af.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n Fear not, my young padawan. Let’s take a look at 404<\/code> errors and how they do (or do
\n not) affect your site:\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Do the 404<\/code> errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking?<\/b>
\n A: 404<\/code> errors are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always
\n changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a
\n 404<\/code> HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404<\/code>
\n errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we
\n actually prefer<\/i> that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it
\n returns a proper 404<\/code> \u0438\u043b\u0438 410<\/code> response code (rather than a soft
\n 404<\/code>). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a
\n URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL\u2014if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won’t be
\n able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist or
\n return 404<\/code> errors does not affect how your site’s other URLs (the ones that return
\n 200 (Success)<\/code>
\n status codes<\/a>) perform in our search results.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: So 404<\/code> errors don’t hurt my website at all?<\/b>
\n A: If some URLs on your site 404<\/code>, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against
\n you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address
\n certain types of 404<\/code> errors. For example, if some of the pages that
\n 404<\/code> are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing
\n 404<\/code> errors when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL
\n (www.example.com\/awsome instead of www.example.com\/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to
\n link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404<\/code>, you could
\n 301<\/code> redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic
\n from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404<\/code> page on
\n your site, you
\n help them find what they were looking for<\/a>
\n rather than just saying “404<\/code> Not found.”\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Tell me more about “soft 404<\/code> errors.”<\/b>
\n A: A
\n soft 404<\/code><\/a>
\n is when a web server returns a response code other than 404<\/code> (or 410<\/code>) for
\n a URL that doesn’t exist. A common example is when a site owner wants to return
\n a pretty 404<\/code> page with helpful information for their users<\/a>,
\n and thinks that in order to serve content to users, they have to return a 200<\/code>
\n response code. Not so! You can return a 404<\/code> response code while<\/i> serving
\n whatever content you want. Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their
\n home page instead of returning 404<\/code> errors. Both of these cases can have negative
\n effects on our understanding and indexing of your site, so we recommend making sure your server
\n returns the proper response codes for nonexistent content. Keep in mind that just because a
\n page says<\/b> “404<\/code> Not Found,” doesn’t mean it’s actually returning a
\n 404<\/code> HTTP response code<\/i>\u2014use the
\n Fetch as Googlebot<\/a>
\n feature in Webmaster Tools to double-check. If you don’t know how to configure your server to
\n return the right response codes, check out your web host’s help documentation.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: How do I know whether a URL should 404<\/code>, or 301<\/code>, or
\n 410<\/code>?<\/b>
\n A: When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere
\n else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site. If you’re moving
\n that content to a new URL, you should 301<\/code> redirect the old URL to the new URL\u2014that
\n way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected
\n to something relevant to what they were looking for. If you’re getting rid of that content
\n entirely and don’t have anything on your site that would fill the same user need, then the old URL
\n should return a 404<\/code> \u0438\u043b\u0438 410<\/code>. Currently Google treats
\n 410 (Gone)<\/code> the same as 404 (Not found)<\/code>, so it’s immaterial to us whether
\n you return one or the other.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Most of my 404<\/code> errors are for bizarro URLs that never existed on my site.
\n What’s up with that? Where did they come from?<\/b>
\n A: If Google finds a link somewhere on the web that points to a URL on your domain, it may try to
\n crawl that link, whether any content actually exists there or not; and when it does, your server
\n should<\/i> return a 404<\/code> if there’s nothing there to find. These links could be
\n caused by someone making a typo when linking to you, some type of misconfiguration (if the links
\n are automatically generated, for example, by a CMS), or by Google’s increased efforts to recognize
\n and crawl links embedded in JavaScript or other embedded content; or they may be part of a quick
\n check from our side to see how your server handles unknown URLs, to name just a few. If you see
\n 404<\/code> errors reported in Webmaster Tools for URLs that don’t exist on your site, you
\n can safely ignore them. We don’t know which URLs are important to you vs. which are supposed to
\n 404<\/code>, so we show you all<\/i> the 404<\/code> errors we found on your site and
\n let you decide which, if any, require your attention.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Someone has scraped my site and caused a bunch of 404<\/code> errors in the
\n process. They’re all “real” URLs with other code tacked on, like
\n https:\/\/www.example.com\/images\/kittens.jpg\" width=\"100\" height=\"300\" alt=\"kittens\"\/><\/code>
\n Will this hurt my site?<\/b>
\n A: Generally you don’t need to worry about “broken links” like this hurting your site. We
\n understand that site owners have little to no control over people who scrape their site, or who
\n link to them in strange ways. If you’re a whiz with the
\n regex<\/a>,
\n you could consider
\n redirecting these URLs<\/a>, but generally
\n it’s not worth worrying about. Remember that you can also file a
\n takedown request<\/a>
\n when you believe someone is stealing original content from your website.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Last week I fixed all the 404<\/code> errors that Webmaster Tools reported, but
\n they’re still listed in my account. Does this mean I didn’t fix them correctly? How long will it
\n take for them to disappear?<\/b>
\n A: Take a look at the ‘Detected’ column on the Crawl errors page\u2014this is the most recent date on
\n which we detected each error. If the date(s) in that column are from before the time you fixed the
\n errors, that means we haven’t encountered these errors since that date. If the dates are more
\n recent, it means we’re continuing to see these 404<\/code> errors when we crawl.\n<\/p>\n\n After implementing a fix, you can check whether our crawler is seeing the new response code by
\n using
\n Fetch as Googlebot<\/a>.
\n Test a few URLs and, if they look good, these errors should soon start to disappear from your
\n list of Crawl errors.\n<\/p>\n\n Q: Can I use Google’s URL removal tool to make 404<\/code> errors disappear from my
\n account faster?<\/b>
\n
\n A: No; the URL removal tool removes URLs from Google’s search results, not from your Webmaster
\n Tools account. It’s designed for urgent removal requests only, and using it isn’t necessary when a
\n URL already returns a 404<\/code>, as such a URL will drop out of our search results
\n naturally over time. See the bottom half of
\n this blog post<\/a>
\n for more details on what the URL removal tool can and can’t do for you.\n<\/p>\n\n Still want to know more about 404<\/code> errors? Check out
\n 404<\/code> week<\/a> from our blog, or drop
\n by our
\n Webmaster Help Forum<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n