🤓 4 facts about the 404 page every SEO should know

Published 6 months ago • 1 min read

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Of course you know what a 404 page is.

But do you know these 4 facts about how Google treats 404 pages?

(The 3rd one might be the most unexpected)

Fact 1:

Your 404 page must return a 404 HTTP response code.

If it returns a 200 code, it will be seen as “soft 404”. It is Google's interpretation of a 200 page that is blank, has thin content or looks like a 404 page.

Fact 2:

When a URL returns a 404 error for some time, Google starts crawling it less frequently. So when Googlebot comes to the website, it first focuses on those URLs which historically don’t return errors. This ensures that the crawl budget isn’t wasted.

Fact 3:

Google won’t use content on a page which returns a 404 (or soft 404) error and will drop this URL from the search.

Fact 4:

If a page returns a 404, Google will ignore all the content found on this page, including any canonical or noindex tags.

One of my Tech SEO Pro students discovered that most pages on his client's website returned 404s instead of 200 HTTP status codes. The pages looked normal at first glance; they had all the content and optimization. But the wrong HTTP status code was ruining everything. They did a pretty easy fix and my student was seen as a hero who finally resolved the mystery 🕵🏼‍♂️

💡 Pro tip:

Monitor your 404 pages in GA4 or your server logs to see which error pages are visited by real users and need to be fixed.

4 facts about the 404 page

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