Today, we launched a revamped a website for one a company. We basically moved from using ASP to PHP pages so the permalink between the old and new is completely different. So one of the questions that I had was whether 404 actually impact on my Google Page ranking. The short answer is no but if you have the time then read the below\u00a0extract from Susan – a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst:\u00a0http:\/\/googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au\/2011\/05\/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html<\/a><\/p>\n Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site\u2019s ranking?<\/strong> Q: So 404s don\u2019t hurt my website at all?<\/strong> Q: Tell me more about \u201csoft 404s.\u201d<\/strong> Q: How do I know whether a URL should 404, or 301, or 410?<\/strong> Q: Most of my 404s are for bizarro URLs that never existed on my site. What\u2019s up with that? Where did they come from?<\/strong> Q: Someone has scraped my site and caused a bunch of 404s in the process. They\u2019re all \u201creal\u201d URLs with other code tacked on, like\u00a0http:\/\/www.example.com\/images\/kittens.jpg” width=”100″ height=”300″ alt=”kittens”\/><\/a…\u00a0Will this hurt my site?<\/strong> Q: Last week I fixed all the 404s that Webmaster Tools reported, but they\u2019re still listed in my account. Does this mean I didn\u2019t fix them correctly? How long will it take for them to disappear? After implementing a fix, you can check whether our crawler is seeing the new response code by using\u00a0Fetch as Googlebot<\/a>. Test a few URLs and, if they look good, these errors should soon start to disappear from your list of Crawl errors. <\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually\u00a0prefer\u00a0that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a \u201csoft 404\u201d). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL\u2014if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won\u2019t be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist \/ return 404s does not affect how your site\u2019s other URLs (the ones that return\u00a0200 (Successful)<\/a>) perform in our search results.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google\u2019s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you\u2019d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we\u2019re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com\/awsome\u00a0instead of\u00a0www.example.com\/awesome), it\u2019s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you\u00a0help them find what they were looking for<\/a>\u00a0rather than just saying \u201c404 Not found.”<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0A\u00a0soft 404<\/a>\u00a0is when a web server returns a response code other than 404 (or 410) for a URL that doesn\u2019t exist. A common example is when a site owner wants to return\u00a0a pretty 404 page with helpful information for his users<\/a>, and thinks that in order to serve content to users he has to return a 200 response code. Not so! You can return a 404 response code\u00a0while\u00a0serving whatever content you want. Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their homepage instead of returning 404s. Both of these cases can have negative effects on our understanding and indexing of your site, so we recommend making sure your server returns the proper response codes for nonexistent content. Keep in mind that\u00a0just because a page\u00a0says\u00a0\u201c404 Not Found,\u201d doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s actually returning a 404 HTTP response code\u2014use the\u00a0Fetch as Googlebot<\/a>\u00a0feature in Webmaster Tools to double-check. If you don\u2019t know how to configure your server to return the right response codes, check out your web host\u2019s help documentation.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site. If you\u2019re moving that content to a new URL, you should 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL\u2014that way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they\u2019ll be automatically redirected to something relevant to what they were looking for. If you\u2019re getting rid of that content entirely and don\u2019t have anything on your site that would fill the same user need, then the old URL should return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found), so it\u2019s immaterial to us whether you return one or the other.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0If Google finds a link somewhere on the web that points to a URL on your domain, it may try to crawl that link, whether any content actually exists there or not; and when it does, your servershould\u00a0return a 404 if there\u2019s nothing there to find. These links could be caused by someone making a typo when linking to you, some type of misconfiguration (if the links are automatically generated, e.g. by a CMS), or by Google\u2019s increased efforts to recognize and crawl links embedded in JavaScript or other embedded content; or they may be part of a quick check from our side to see how your server handles unknown URLs, to name just a few. If you see 404s reported in Webmaster Tools for URLs that don\u2019t exist on your site, you can safely ignore them. We don\u2019t know which URLs are important to you vs. which are supposed to 404, so we show youall\u00a0the 404s we found on your site and let you decide which, if any, require your attention.<\/p>\n
\nA:\u00a0Generally you don\u2019t need to worry about \u201cbroken links\u201d like this hurting your site. We understand that site owners have little to no control over people who scrape their site, or who link to them in strange ways. If you\u2019re a whiz with the\u00a0regex<\/a>, you could consider redirecting these URLs\u00a0as described here<\/a>, but generally it\u2019s not worth worrying about. Remember that you can also file a\u00a0takedown request<\/a>\u00a0when you believe someone is stealing original content from your website.<\/p>\n
\nA:<\/strong>\u00a0Take a look at the \u2018Detected\u2019 column on the Crawl errors page\u2014this is the most recent date on which we detected each error. If the date(s) in that column are from before the time you fixed the errors, that means we haven\u2019t encountered these errors since that date. If the dates are more recent, it means we\u2019re continuing to see these 404s when we crawl.<\/p>\n
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\nQ: Can I use Google\u2019s URL removal tool to make 404 errors disappear from my account faster?
\nA:<\/strong>\u00a0No; the URL removal tool removes URLs from Google\u2019s search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. It\u2019s designed for urgent removal requests only, and using it isn\u2019t necessary when a URL already returns a 404, as such a URL will drop out of our search results naturally over time. See the bottom half of\u00a0this blog post<\/a>\u00a0for more details on what the URL removal tool can and can\u2019t do for you.<\/p>\n