In continuation of the SEO Snippets videos where Google’s John Mueller answers popular questions in a short video, Google answered the typical 404 errors question. Do 404 errors hurt, do you need to fix them, can your rankings drop because of them, how do you handle links or traffic? All of this is stuff we covered numerous times over the years but John Mueller summed it up well in a short video:
In short, 404s are normal and if you intentionally 404 a page that you no longer have and have no matching new page URL then 404 makes sense. If you are losing traffic or links, you may want to point the links from the old URL to a new one, depending on relevance. Watch the video above for a quick overview.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
