The other day I reported that Google Crawls 404s After Other Pages So No Crawl Budget Is Sacrificed. So I asked, somewhat in a joking way “so maybe a spike in 404s mean you have some excellent crawl budget expenditure for your site?”

In any event, it seems others asked the question also where David Iwanow asked, if Google is not trying your 404s every now and then, is that a sign of a crawl issue. John Mueller from Google said no, it is not. Here are the tweets:

So don’t freak out if Google isn’t trying your 404s, it isn’t a bad thing.

Dawn Anderson then reminded me on Twitter that John addressed this topic a year ago. In a video at around the 27 minute mark he went into this. Then at 30:49 into the video John said:

If Google has extra capacity, they will go at it. If not, not.

Forum discussion at Twitter.