Do I need to worry about these 404s after changing permalinks structure?

[linklander]

Not long ago I wanted to change the permalink structure on a blog where the full date was included in the post urls to one where it was just /category/blog-post-title. The site is on a managed host and they setup the redirects for me and then I changed the permalink structure in the WP settings. Everything worked fine after and all old posts now redirect to the new structure.

However in Google search console I can see that my 404s report has jumped from a few hundred to several thousands but it seems to be counting the urls paths to elements such as images within the old posts permalink structure eg

/2012/6/some-post/some-image-in-post

all the old posts themselves and their content redirects fine though.

Do I need to worry about these 404s? It annoys me to see so many in my reports like that even if they aren't hurting my site

[badgergravling]

So, a 404 won't affect your overall SEO. It may affect usability if your higher traffic pages are resulting in an error. Obviously if it's images only, then that's less of a concern unless you were driving lots of traffic via image search.

Generally if you redirect everything, then the image links should be updated to (I did the same thing on one of my own sites fairly recently). But it may simply be Search Console lagging behind a bit... It's annoying if you want to have no errors on your reports (and I get bugged by the same thing sometimes, even on sites with 100s of thousands of pages), but as long as the posts are working fine, I wouldn't worry too much.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Mark,

Have you figured out if the URLs that are 404'ing are still mentioned somewhere. Either in the canonical tags or somewhere else or that something is wrong with the redirects?

Martijn.