Why is a 404 rated as High Priority Issue?

[jeeyer]

This post is deleted!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Joost

404s are high priority because it needs to be brought to your attention that pages are returning as Not Found. Meaning, that if you have important pages with good equity or good content that suddenly return errors, that could potentially be a bad user experience/bad for search visibility and you need to remedy it as soon as you can.

Now, it's upto you to decide the importance of that error and how to prioritize it, but it's Moz and other crawlers job to make you aware.

When you have these issues, you have options. For instance, if the product is never coming back, you could redirect the page to a relevant product or category, remove the page from your sitemap, and change internal links, or simply create a custom 404 page. But, if the product is coming back and temporarily unavailable, you could create an out of stock message to let users know the product isn't available at the moment (and will be back) but there's a whole site to explore and check out other products. But again, you have to keep the user in mind with errors on your site.

That is why the 404 is a high priority - it could create issues with the user experience and crawling of your site - but that's upto you to decide how to handle it.

Here's more from Matt Cutts on the subject.

Does this all make sense? Let me know - hope this helps - good luck!

[jeeyer]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for taking the time to look into this matter for me.
Your first suggestion a re-direct is probably the best way to go.
Most of the products are changing every season, and get slightly updated in colour of fit so a redirect is the best way to go imo.

If products are never coming back I will update my sitemap and internal links.

I'm trying this plugin to help me out with re-directs: https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-pagepost-redirect-plugin/Seems to be a good solution for redirecting pages and post, so if anyone needs it try it out!

Thanks again Patrick. Question answered.

Joost