Historically, Google advises that pages serving a 404 status code are a basic practice, and most websites have a few.
But in a recent LinkedIn thread, Google’s Gary Illyes said there are sometimes better approaches than a 404 response.
Google on when to fix 404 errors
When a server can’t find a user’s requested webpage, they’ll see either
“404 Error,” “404 Page Not Found,” or “The requested URL was not found.”
Reasons can be that the content has been deleted or uses a new URL, and the internal links still need to be updated.
So far, nothing new.
However, Google’s Search Team Analyst, Gary Illyes, shared cases where the 404 status code should be fixed.
Here’s what Gary posted on LinkedIn:
- “404 (Not found) errors are not to be afraid of, and you don’t need to scramble to fix them (at least not most of the time).”
404 Status code Vs. 200 status code
Gary gave Google’s reason a 404 status code should appear and two examples of when to fix 404 errors to show a 200 status code or redirect to a helpful URL:
“A HTTP 404 status code is for cases when a URL on your server is not mapped to a resource, so from your perspective, it can be one of these two buckets:”
- “The URL SHOULD return content and a 200 status code.”
- “The URL was indeed not supposed to return content. This second bucket could be split further, specifically URLs that could be useful to users and URLs that are absolutely useless.”
Mapping and useless URLs
Gary shared cases when the 404 (not found) should show a 200 (all good) status code:
- “The URL SHOULD return content and a 200 status code. For example, you accidentally deleted the HTML mapped to the URL, or you messed up something with your database. You should fix these as soon as possible, especially if the URL is important to your users and thus site.”
- “The URL was indeed not supposed to return content, which can be either:”
- “The URL COULD be useful to users. You should probably think about mapping these URLs somehow to a piece of content on your site by e.g. redirecting. Some cases I’ve seen that fall into this category are broken links from high user-traffic pages; the users tap on the link, they find a 404 error even though you have the perfect content for them.”
- “The URL is absolutely useless. From a user’s perspective, there’s nothing you should do about these. If you do, you just mislead them. Some cases I’ve seen that fall into this category is off-site links to content that you don’t have (say you changed business and you don’t sell surströmming anymore).”
Gary wrapped it up by adding:
- “Unconventional as it may be, you don’t need to fix all 404 errors: fix those that actually will help users.”
How Google handles 404s
Gary answered more questions about 404s, starting with one asked by Pierre Paqueton:
Gary replied:
Evgeny Orlov asked:
Jimmy Hartill finished the tread by asking:
The takeaway
No one enjoys landing on a 404; most people feel a little miffed that the site has misled them and wasted their time.
In some cases, they’re right because it’s often laziness on the site owners’ (or webmasters) behalf or not knowing what to do instead.
Gary advises removing a useless URL (and broken links) or mapping them to other content your users might find relevant by redirecting.
This way, you won’t mislead your visitors, and the content you redirect to could be what converts them to take action.
When he is not writing content, Terry can be found on his boat in Italy or chilling in his villa in Spain.
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