The infamous ‘404’ error code often keeps website owners awake at night, but some recent advice from Google suggests that we shouldn’t worry.
The infamous ‘404’ error code often keeps website owners awake at night, but some recent advice from Google suggests that we shouldn’t worry. Google’s John Mueller said that a page which has gone away should return that code: “If they are supposed to be 404s, then there’s nothing to do. 404s for pages that don’t exist are fine. It’s technically correct to have them return 404.”
He also clarified that the ‘mark as fixed’ feature in Search Console doesn’t actually do anything – it’s a tool for users to monitor what they’ve done. So if we redirect a page that’s been removed, this indicator is not some way of speeding up Google’s reindexing of the URL.
For pages that are not meant to return a 404, Mueller advises that “the important part is to fix the issue, set up the redirects, have the new content return 200, check internal links, update sitemap dates, etc. If it hasn’t been too long (days), then probably it’ll pick up again quickly. If it’s been a longer time, and if it’s a lot of pages on the new site, then (perhaps obviously) it’ll take longer to be reprocessed.”