Do 404 error pages spell bad news for your site’s organic search rankings?
Almost all of us who have spent any significant time online are familiar with “404 errors”. The “404” status code indicates that a page the user was attempting to visit doesn’t exist. This might have arisen due to the link being spelt incorrectly or the given page having been taken down from the site since the link was put on the page the user is trying to come from.
However, some online business owners may be anxious to know whether any 404 errors that the user encounters on their site would have negative implications for the entire site’s chances of ranking strongly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So, here at Piranha Designs, we decided we would take a look at precisely this subject.
What does Google say about the impact of 404 error pages?
One of the most important things to emphasise – news likely to be greeted with relief by some ecommerce site owners – is that a 404 error is not a direct ranking signal. So, if you have a few “broken” links across your site leading to 404 errors, you generally don’t have to worry about this being directly detrimental to your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
The then-Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa, addressed this as far back as 2011. In a Google Search Central blog post entitled “Do 404 errors hurt my site?”, she explained that “if some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.”
Moskwa further explained that search engines were aware of 404 errors being “a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code.”
She went on to state that Google actually preferred those removing a page from their website ensuring that it returned “a proper 404 or 410 response code”, as opposed to a “soft 404”. Doing this, after all, presents a clear signal of the page being unavailable.
Google’s Search Console guidelines further emphasise this, stating: “It’s important to make sure that these and other invalid URLs return a proper 404 HTTP response code, and that they are not blocked by the site’s robots.txt file.” The support article stating this goes on to provide advice on how to deal with 404 errors on one’s site.
However, you shouldn’t be complacent about 404 errors on your site
While the above words from Google might reassure you about the effects (or lack of them) that 404 pages may have on your site’s search engine rankings, it is still a good idea to closely watch the Google Search Console “Pages” report. This is an important resource for drawing attention to unindexed URLs and the reasons, such as 404 codes.
When you do look over the Search Console list of 404s for your site, you should confirm firstly that you actually intended the given page to be removed, and secondly that there aren’t any internal links pointing to those pages. The latter is crucial because if a visitor to your site ends up with a broken link, this could frustrate them and make them less likely to go on to buy a product or service from you.
It is also worth bearing in mind that a page being deleted from your site could cause some harm to your search rankings if it contained internal and external links, given that the page’s absence will mean no link equity being passed.
Hopefully, the above has provided you with some useful information about the relationship between deleted pages or 404 errors with SEO.
To learn more about how Piranha Designs can help enhance your business’s online success as one of the leading website design, graphic design, SEO, and bespoke system solution companies in Gibraltar, the UK, and Spain, please don’t hesitate to contact us now.
