Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them

[BobGW]

Hello,

According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site.

There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s

Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?

[Stewart_SEO]

Per se they don't but a high bounce rate will harm your site - no one knows the extent of this but an adverse bounce rate makes up a part of the quality ranking signals (more than 200) Google uses to evaluate a site in the serps.

Therefore having several 404's can effect a bounce rate figure negatively and ultimately harm a site to a lesser or greater degree.

However, 50 I don't think is high relative to the numbers of visitors that navigate to a second page which is a postive metric - if that is the case for you I wouldn't worry. But 50 404's on a website with 200 pages is bad.

[TammyWood]

I agree with Stewart, but it's also a tricky thing. Are you 100% positive there are no rogue links out in the www linking to any of these sites? Have you reviewed your site map are they hanging out in there? Could there be a 301 somewhere pointing to it? Not so much bounce rate I would be concerned about but usability - which is something that Google is taking a look at.

[MoosaHemani]

I highly agree to stewart’s statement that 404 might not affect rankings but lot of 404 will create a high bounce rate and this defiantly will increase the bounce rate which can cause the ranking drop.

When I work with clients, one of the first jobs I do is to reduce the 404’s number to minimum. It is not necessary to take it to zero but reduce it as much as you can!

[BobGW]

What's the best way to find the 404s in 9000 pages if they don't show up in GWT?

[danatanseo]

Hi Bob,

I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.

Hope that helps!

Dana

[BobGW]

Hi Dana,

Thank you. I thought of that too but these pages aren't linked to anywhere in the site anymore so am I correct that screaming frog won't find them?