Yes, they do.
Good, thanks for the read.
Enjoy your day.
But, seriously, how bad are 404 errors really? If you’ve got a lot of them and are stressed about fixing all that mess, how urgent is it really?
Let’s find out.
~4 Minute Read
Quick Answer
404 errors lead Google's crawling robots to nowhere, which wastes the so-called crawl budget and slows down your progress. This is because the time Google could have spent crawling your legit web pages with value, they'd just spent finding out your broken links.
What Are 404 Errors?
These errors are shown on a page when a user visits a broken link. A broken link is:
- A link to a page that used to exist before, but no longer does on a given website
- A link to a page that never existed on a given website, like anywebsite.com/vjfnkfgjfbgbfkfjgvb, as an example
A 404 is a “status code” of a website, and it’s just one of many that can exist on any website on the web.
Status Codes
Besides 404s, other status codes all people doing SEO will run into are:
- 200: Valid page, like this one.
- 301: A permanent redirect to another page. Anybody who visits URL A would be sent to URL B instantly.
- 302: A temporary redirect, often used in development.
- 403: Forbidden access, which people typically bypass with a VPN. Forbidden access is typically set to geographically narrow a given website’s audience.
- 502: Unexpected error; server failure. Spam attacks could sometimes lead to 5xx status codes.
There are literally dozens of other status codes, which a few of you nerds might be interested in checking out here, but these five, along with 404s, are what most SEOers will run into.
But let’s stick to our 404s from now on.
Why Are 404 Errors Bad for SEO?
These errors waste the so-called crawl budget. If you don’t know what this is, hear me out.
A crawl budget is, basically, the amount of resources Google can dedicate to checking out your website on a given website.
Most new or small websites have smaller crawl budgets. The smaller the crawl budget, the slower Google will check and find changes you’ve made to your website.
As your site grows, your crawl budget increases, leading to faster processing of your website and SEO work, yielding better results in terms of traffic, leads, and sales.
Here’s a metaphor (I love doing these; they’re so fun).
Think of a crawl budget as your car engine and 404 errors as holes in a highway. If the highway is bad, you can’t drive as fast (unless you live in the Balkans, ahah), preventing you from arriving as fast to your destination.
That’s what 404 errors do, and as long as you have them on your website, your SEO highway will have holes.
How to Check for 404 Pages?
Google Search Console
You should have your website verified in Google Search Console by now. If not, do it, and then come back to this article. Follow Google’s instructions on how to verify your website there.
Once you’re inside, go to Pages on the left sidebar and check your errors below.
Scroll below and you’ll see this:
Now, while Search Console is helpful in this regard, it doesn’t show the actual source of the error, which is where Ahrefs comes in.
Ahrefs Audit
Let’s get into an unofficial industry standard for technical SEO, out of which 404 errors are a part, and that’s Ahrefs Audit and the red errors.
Ahrefs, when you run your website for it to check your technical errors, shows errors, warnings, and notices:
- Errors will be colored red
- Warnings will be colored yellow
- Notices will be colored blue
You can see the example in the image above.
Generally, it’s recommended you fix AT LEAST errors. Many warnings and notices are simply not important, whereas errors are crucial as they waste your crawl budget and slow your SEO down.
Ahrefs will also guide on which pages these errors exist, helping you fix them.
Sign up for the Ahrefs Webmasters plan (FREE), and then enter your website to run an audit.
The interface above you won’t see. It’s for every other website you add to Ahrefs. Instead, you’ll be taken to this screen.
And then you’ll wait some time; depending on the size of your website, the audit can take a few hours. Then check back into the Ahrefs Site Audit page and click on your audit’s results.
NOTE: Click on the white space next to your website for the most recent audit results. Click on the website domain name itself will show you ALL of your audits so far, like you see below:
Once you click on that white space, you’ll see something like this.
Under “Top Issues,” you may see 4xx errors:
Simply click on them and you’ll see both the broken link itself and where it’s found.
Broken Images
Ahrefs also scans for broken images, AKA, images you’ve previously uploaded to your website’s library and then added to your page, and then that image has been removed from the library but it’s still pasted on the page.
Find and get rid of those as well.
How to Fix 404 Errors
Well, simply log in to your website and replace those links with the ones that are working.
Voila, you’re done!
Now, your crawl budget won’t be wasted, and Google will have a much easier time checking AND ranking your website higher on search.
Can’t think of an adequate page to replace your broken link with?
You could temporarily use another website’s page or post on the same topic, write a few additional sentences to change the context and link to a different page on your website, or simply make a replacement page to link to.
How Quickly Should I Fix My 404 Errors?
I’d say right away.
The reason is that having 404 errors prevents Google from fully crawling your website and see the good things you’re doing.
This seriously hinders your SEO, and you should mitigate it right away, regardless of whether you have only one 404 error or hundreds.
Wrapping Up
That’s about it for 404 errors.
Need someone to check ALL issues your website has? For FREE?
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Bogdan is a local SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow using Google. When he is not helping businesses grow, he works on his own SEO projects, works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.