404s: what matters and what does not
A page not found is not a disease of your site, it is a normal web response code. Sorting the 404s that do not matter from the ones that bleed, based on the status code documentation.
The Search Console indexing report shows “not found (404)” entries, and the usual reaction is alarm: my site is broken. The status code documentation invites more calm: 404 is a normal operating code, one Google runs into constantly, and its only effect is that the page does not enter the index. The whole question is which page.
The 404s that deserve nothing
A page deleted on purpose should return 404: it is the honest answer, “this content no longer exists”. A product withdrawn from the catalogue with no replacement, an out-of-date news item you chose to take down, an old address nobody ever linked to: their 404 is the system working. Making them vanish from the report by redirecting them all to the home page would be the lazy reflex already called out in the article on redirects: Google treats those unrelated redirects as 404s in disguise, only slower and more misleading for the visitor.
The 404s that bleed
The serious 404 is recognised by one question: does this address still receive visits or links? A missing page that a local directory’s menu, a press article or ten of your own pages point to loses real visitors and wastes the weight of the links received. That one calls for a move, one of two: the permanent redirect to the page that took over the role, if there is one; putting it back online, if the deletion was an accident.
The sorting is therefore a cross-check: the list of 404s from the indexing report on one side, and on the other what you know about your important addresses. Ten minutes of the monthly routine are enough, because the list barely moves.
The 404 page itself
There remains the visitor who lands on it. A default 404 page, white and in English, is an exit from the site; a 404 page in your colours, which says “this page no longer exists” and offers the journal search, the home page and the contact page, is a detour. Check yours by typing anything after your domain name: what you see is what a customer with an old link sees.
And one thing the 404 page must never do: pretend everything is fine. Serving the home page, or any content at all, with an “all is well” code on an address that does not exist manufactures what the documentation calls soft 404s: empty pages the engine has to guess are errors. Honesty in response codes is a small technical loyalty, and as always, it is rewarded.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.