What is the 404 error and why is it so detrimental to SEO?

The 404 error is one of the most common errors on the internet, you got it when browsing, and on some unfortunate occasions, it will be thrown by your own pages, which can seriously mess up your SEO.

In this post we will talk about the abominable 404 error, what it means, the reasons why it appears on your website or any other and how you can remedy it.

Let’s get started!

Error 404 Not Found, what does it mean?

The 404 error is a server response code that indicates that the page or URL you searched for is not available or does not exist.

As you can imagine, this is a mistake that completely sabotages the user experience, as it prevents you from getting what you need, or the link you clicked on from taking you where you want to go.

With all this, any user will be very tempted to leave the page or look for another one that does offer the information they are looking for. And all this sabotages your positioning, and the image that your site projects before Google. Not good.

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What causes the 404 error?

The 404 error implies the inability to access a content on the web, and these are some of its causes:

• Content loads too slowly: if the content is too heavy, or needs to load many elements before it works properly, it can cause 404 errors.
• Problems with the robot.txt file: sometimes a misconfigured robot.txt file can mess up the loading of your page, which could cause 404 errors.
• The website changed its link structure: when a website changes its link structure it must apply redirects so that its old links do not break, otherwise they will lead to a 404 error.
• The content was deleted by its owner: if you delete content from your site, all links leading to it will return a 404 error code. 

Recognizing the causes of 404 errors will allow you to apply effective solutions and keep your website’s SEO in top condition.

How to solve the 404 error?

Once you have identified the sections of your site that are producing 404 errors, it is time to take action and correct them. To do this, you need to identify the reasons why the URL in question is failing.

Depending on the error, certain solutions will be more appropriate than others.

In case you have changed the link structure of your site recently, all your old URLs will start generating a lot of 404’s. To remedy this, simply apply a redirect from each of your old URLs to your new URLs. To remedy this, simply apply a redirect from each of the old URLs to your new URLs.

On the other hand, if your page is not well optimized and its elements do not load well, it can generate soft 404 errors; to adjust it you will have to improve the loading speed of your site and clean your website of unnecessary code, heavy plugins and unused elements. 

You will also have to carefully check the robot.txt file and verify that it is not blocking Google or other browsers from loading resources from your website.

What to do with 404 errors that you can’t avoid?

Let’s say you had a couple of posts on your blog that you were not convinced about and you decided to delete them, can you imagine what will happen to the links pointing to them on the rest of the internet?

The answer is that they will become 404 errors. You will have no way to redirect them because there will be no content designed to replace it, and just directing to the home page of your website will be confusing. 

For these and similar cases, the best thing to do is to create a custom 404 page, which indicates that the content is not available. The advantage of using a custom page for this is that you can give it your own touch, and you can channel that traffic to other valuable sections of your website.

It is the ultimate solution if you cannot repair your 404 in any other way.

How to detect 404 errors?

To detect broken links that cause 404 errors you can use tools such as Google Search Console, which tells you automatically; or Screaming Frog, which crawls your entire website and detects, among other things, the type of bad links that can cause 404 code.

Why is it bad for SEO?

First of all, because 404 errors ruin the user experience, lead them to dead ends within your website and don’t resolve their search intent. And that means one thing, a high bounce rate and a short dwell time. All of which impacts your SEO in a negative way.

And secondly, these types of problems hinder Google’s crawling. Leading any search engine to dead links and non-existent pages guarantees that they will see your website as a very low quality site.In a nutshell: if you want your website to achieve rankings, consolidate its authority as a quality site and outperform your competition, you will have to pay attention to 404 errors, and fix them as soon as possible.