404 Errors and SEO: When You Should Fix Them and When You Shouldn’t
If you’ve ever looked at Google Search Console and seen hundreds of URLs marked as “Not found,” you may have wondered whether those 404 errors are hurting your SEO.
The short answer is: not necessarily.
A 404 response is a normal part of the web.
Pages get deleted. Products are discontinued. Websites change their URL structures. People make mistakes when creating links.
The important thing is understanding which 404s matter and which ones don’t.
What is a 404 error?
A 404 Not Found response tells a browser or search engine that the requested URL doesn’t currently have a resource available at that location.
For example:
example.com/old-service
might have existed six months ago but no longer exists today.
If there is no relevant replacement, returning a 404 can be the correct technical response.
A 404 isn’t automatically an SEO problem.
Why do websites have so many 404 URLs?
You might find 404 URLs in Google Search Console that you don’t recognize.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your website is broken.
Google can discover URLs from many sources, including external websites, incorrect links, typos, old URLs, automatically generated links, and malformed URLs.
Someone could link to:
example.com/servcie
instead of:
example.com/service
If that first URL was never a real page, there may be nothing you need to fix.
When should you fix a 404?
The first question I’d ask is:
Should this URL exist?
If the answer is yes, investigate.
Perhaps the page was accidentally deleted. Maybe a URL was changed without implementing a redirect. Or perhaps an internal link still points to an outdated URL.
Those are situations worth fixing.
When should you use a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is useful when content has moved to another URL and the destination is relevant.
For example:
/old-service
becomes:
/new-service
A visitor who follows the old URL can then be sent to the new page.
But don’t redirect every 404 to your homepage.
If there is no relevant replacement, an irrelevant redirect can create a worse experience than simply returning a 404.
What is a soft 404?
A soft 404 is slightly different.
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The page may tell visitors that the content doesn’t exist, but the server returns a successful HTTP status such as 200 OK.
For example:
/page-that-does-not-exist
displays:
“Sorry, this page could not be found.”
but technically returns:
200 OK
For genuinely nonexistent content, the server should normally return a proper 404 or 410 response.
This distinction matters because search engines use HTTP status codes as part of understanding how a URL should be handled.
What about 410 Gone?
A 410 Gone response indicates that a resource has been intentionally removed.
Both 404 and 410 can be used when content is no longer available.
For most websites, I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about the difference unless there is a specific technical reason to use one over the other.
The bigger issue is making sure permanently nonexistent URLs aren’t incorrectly returning successful responses.
What I check before removing a page
Before permanently removing an important URL, I’d look at:
- Organic traffic
- Backlinks
- Internal links
- Search visibility
- Whether there is a relevant replacement
- Whether the page still serves a business purpose
A page with traffic and valuable backlinks deserves more investigation than a random URL that has never existed.
That doesn’t mean every high-traffic URL must stay live.
It means you should understand what you’re giving up before removing it.
Don’t chase zero 404s
This is probably the biggest takeaway.
You don’t need to eliminate every 404 from your website.
A healthy website can have 404 URLs.
What you want to avoid is unintentional 404s.
If a valuable page should exist, fix it.
If content moved, redirect it appropriately.
If an internal link is broken, update it.
If a page was permanently removed and has no relevant replacement, a 404 may be exactly what should happen.
And if a strange URL never existed in the first place, you probably don’t need to create something just because Google discovered it.
SEO isn’t about making every URL return 200 OK. It’s about making sure each URL has the right response for its purpose.
For a deeper look at how to handle 404s, soft 404s, redirects, internal links, and deleted content, see my full guide:
