What Should I Do With 404 Errors?

[sbrault74]

I got lots of 404 errors due to the fact that I removed some crappy content. Do I need to worry about this?

I know eventually they will go away when Google crawls the whole website and doesn't find any more links to those pages.

[sbrault74]

What do you think of a plugin like this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/auto-redirect-404/

[Johnny4B]

You should redirect the page you removed to another page within your website.

[Johnny4B]

Oh, and I assume you have created 404 page within your website .. if not you should do that also to handle the genuine errors, be user of you

[ovenbird]

I thought our 404's would eventually go away. Later discovered that some were also linked from other sites. Moral of the story for us is that we would have done redirects sooner. We're currently chipping away at over 40k 404 errors, but its a high priority for us to redirect each and every one of them. Going forward we are better managing what happens to a link when it gets changed. We dynamically are generating 404's for newly changed URL's (wish we did that sooner...)

[NakulGoyal]

404's in Google Webmaster Console show for 90 days (Even though I have seen then appear for longer). In my opinion, if for the user, it's a good experience for them to be redirected to a better page or a sitemap or homepage or an upper level category page, do that. But if it does not make sense for the user, don't do it.

Just don't have active 404 links within your website. If there are external links pointing to old pages, redirect those to maximize the user experience and SEO value of those links and traffic coming from those. Other then that, I would not worry about it.

I hope this helps.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

404 pages won't affect your site performance in any way - aslong as you don't heavily link to those pages internally.

Redirecting, in my opinion, is not a very good idea - as long as you don't have some better content that is touching the exact same subject, in a better way, as the old page. if this is not the case - I would't spend any more time on those - Google will clean them up after 3-4 bot visits.

cheers !