60,000 404 errors

[the-gate-films]

Do 404 errors on a large scale really matter? I'm just aware that I now have over 60,000 and was wondering if the community think that I should address them by putting 301 redirects in place.

Thanks

[Mobilio]

Yes - large scale 404 can trigger Panda:
http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html

But don't 301 them. Just fix links from source pages where clicking lead to 404 - replace them with other pages similar to missing one.

[Gyorgy.B]

I had similar issues on large e-commerce websites, where these pages were not in navigation, but were in Google's index, so Webmaster Tools reported tens of thousands of 404s.

Keeping this many 301 redirections would have put a large load on the server, so we made sure that navigation and site search doesn't link to these pages and later Google removed them from its index.

On the other hand, Peter is right. It depends on the ratio of live and broken pages. If you have 100k pages and 60k is 404, then Google will most likely ignore your website's crawling and indexing of new pages. You need to have a very dodgy website to trigger a Panda penalty, though. 404 happens all the time and Google is quite patient with the website admins to fix it.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Check your sitemap and update your internal links. This usually helps takes care of a major portion of your problem.

From there, check your backlinks and make sure you update those that are relevant to your site and remove those that are not.

I would take a look at the 404 list - see what pages you could easily redirect to relevant pages the user would still find valuable, and custom 404 the others. You could also 410 pages, but I would use that wisely, because it's not really that necessary.

Lastly, here's a great resource from Matt Cutts on SEW that helps SEOs handle eCommerce 404s.

Hope this helps! Good luck!