In the latest episodes of Google’s SEO Snippets video series, John Mueller addresses a webmaster’s question about 404 errors.
The site owner was curious if 404 errors should be a concern when they appear in older versions of a site.
“What should I do with 404s in Search Console that are from ancient versions of my site?” they asked.
Mueller explains briefly why 404 errors occur and recommends the standard SEO practice of setting up redirects to relevant pages. However, even with redirects, 404 errors may still appear in Search Console.
Site owners might decide to drop redirects due to the maintenance costs involved or might simply forget about them. Regardless, 404s may start showing up for old sections of a site.
Is this a problem? It depends on how old those parts of the site are. If they’re so old that they’re no longer linked to internally and are not receiving any traffic, then that’s “perfectly fine.”
If the URLs returning 404 errors are being linked to from other pages of the site and/or receiving traffic, they should be addressed by setting up redirects.
This solution may be manageable for a few URLs, but what if there are many 404 errors showing up? Mueller suggests relying on Search Console’s assessment of crawl errors.
Google Search Console sorts crawl errors by priority. If Search Console determines that all top crawl errors are irrelevant, setting up redirects is unnecessary.
For Mueller’s full response, he provides a video and transcript:
“In your server logs, or analytics, check for traffic to those URLs. If there’s no traffic, that’s great. In Search Console check for links to those URLs. Are there no relevant links? That’s great too. If you see nothing special in either the links or the traffic, having those pages return 404 is perfectly fine.
If you do see traffic to those URLs or see links pointing at those URLs, check where they’re coming from and have those links point at the new URLs instead. Or, if it looks like a lot of traffic or links are going to those URLs, perhaps putting a redirect back in place would be more efficient.
That approach works for a few crawl errors, but what if you have many 404 errors? Search Console makes this easy by prioritizing crawl errors for you. If the top errors in the report are all irrelevant, you can rest assured there is nothing more important further down the list. Crawl errors for 404s that you don’t want to have indexed don’t negatively affect the rest of your site in search. So take your time to find a good approach that works for you.”
