Not found (404) in Search Console: which to fix and which to leave
Most 404s in Search Console are harmless. Fix the ones your sitemap or own pages link to, and 301 URLs with backlinks to their closest equivalent page.
LLaunchScaler·Published ·8 min read
A Not found (404) row in Search Console lists URLs Google requested that your server answered with 404, and many of them need no fix: a 404 for a page that should not exist is the correct response and does not hurt the rest of your site. Fix a 404 only when someone still points at it: your sitemap, your own pages, or other sites linking in.
That gives you a simple keep-or-fix rule per URL, based on who links to it.
What does "Not found (404)" mean in Search Console?
It means Googlebot requested the URL and got a 404. Search Console's help says Google "discovered this URL without any explicit request or sitemap," either "as a link from another page" or because "the page existed before and was deleted." It adds that "404 responses are not necessarily a problem, if the page has been removed without any replacement."
Two details shape how you read the row. The report "shows only URLs that have shown 404 errors in the past month," so old errors fall off on their own. And "Googlebot will probably continue to try this URL for some period of time; there is no way to tell Googlebot to permanently forget a URL, although it will crawl it less and less often." Seeing an old URL here for a while after you removed it is normal.
Not on their own. Google's post on the question says "404 errors are a perfectly normal part of the web," and that "the fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist or return 404 errors does not affect how your site's other URLs ... perform in our search results." The Crawl Stats help goes further: "It's not possible, worthwhile, or even desirable to fix all 404 errors on your site."
What does cost you is a 404 on a page that should exist, or a link of yours that sends visitors and crawlers into one. Google's indexing pipeline "removes the URL from the index if it was previously indexed" when it returns 404 or 410, so a real page that starts answering 404 by mistake drops out of search. Google's help puts the rule in one line: "we recommend fixing only 404 errors that you link to yourself or list in a sitemap."
A 404 is also far better than the alternative of answering 200 for missing pages, which creates . Google says it prefers that a removed page "returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a soft 404)."
Questions, answered
What people ask about this
01
What does Not found (404) mean in Google Search Console?
Google requested the URL and your server returned 404. Google found the URL through a link or because the page used to exist, and its help says 404 responses are not necessarily a problem if the page was removed with no replacement.
Which 404s should you fix and which should you leave?
Decide by who links to the URL. If nothing on your site and no other site points at it, leave it: it is a removed page or a URL that never existed. If your sitemap or your own pages point at it, fix your side. If other sites link to it, redirect it to its closest equivalent so those links land somewhere useful.
Who points at the 404
What it usually is
Action
Nobody you can find
A removed page, or a URL Google probed
Leave it as 404
Malformed URLs from scrapers (/image.jpg" width="100")
Broken copies of real URLs
Leave it; Google says it is "not worth worrying about"
Your XML sitemap
A stale sitemap entry
Remove it from the sitemap, or restore the page
Your own pages
A broken internal link
Fix the link; if the page moved, also 301 the old URL
Other sites
A backlink to a moved or deleted page
301 to the closest equivalent page
A typo of a real URL (/awsome for /awesome)
Someone meant to link to you
301 to the correct URL
A page you deleted on purpose, no replacement
Correct behaviour
Leave it as 404, or return 410
Google's own example for the typo case: redirect "the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link." For URLs that never existed, it says "you can safely ignore them."
How do you find out who links to a 404 URL?
Use URL Inspection for the source Google recorded, the sitemap filter for your own submissions, and the Links report export for other sites. Together they sort most rows in a few minutes. Your own crawl of the site catches internal links Google has not reported yet.
Open the Not found (404) row and export the example URLs.
Set the sitemap filter above the chart to "All submitted pages." Any 404 still listed is in one of your sitemaps.
Paste a few 404 URLs into URL Inspection and read Discovery: Sitemaps lists sitemaps that include the URL, and Referring page shows a page Google may have used to find it.
For backlinks, open the Links report, click Export on its landing page and choose Latest links, which holds up to 100,000 of the most recently discovered links to your site. Match the target URLs against your 404 list.
Crawl your own site with any link checker and list internal links that return 4xx.
The Links report groups pages by canonical URL and notes that some URLs, "such as non-indexed pages," may be omitted, so a 404 target can be missing from its tables even when links exist. The export and URL Inspection's referring page fill that gap. The broken internal links guide covers the crawl in detail.
Where should a 404 URL redirect?
To the single page that best replaces it, with a 301 in one hop. A deleted product goes to its successor or its category, a renamed article goes to its new URL, and a merged guide goes to the merged page. Never send every missing URL to the homepage: Google treats that as a soft 404.
Google's site move guide is explicit: "Don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site. This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error." It allows one exception: when content "previously hosted on multiple pages" was consolidated into one new page, redirecting the old URLs to it is fine.
For URLs with backlinks, the redirect is what lets those links count for a live page. The same guide says keeping redirects for "generally at least 1 year" gives Google time "to transfer all signals to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that point to your old URLs." Some rules for the redirects themselves:
Use 301 or 308, which Google treats as strong signals that the target should be canonical.
Point straight at the final URL. A redirect to a URL that redirects again builds a chain; the redirect chains and loops guide shows how to collapse them.
Make sure the target returns 200 and is indexable.
If there is no genuine equivalent, leave the 404. A redirect to an unrelated page helps no one.
Should a removed page return 404 or 410?
Either works for Google. Its 2011 post said "Google treats 410 (Gone) the same as 404 (Not found), so it's immaterial to us whether you return one or the other," and its current crawler documentation groups the two: for 404 and 410 alike, Google's indexing pipeline removes a previously indexed URL, and "newly encountered 404 pages aren't processed."
Use 410 if you want the response to say "gone on purpose" to people and other tools reading your logs, and 404 otherwise. What matters more is the page people see. Google recommends a custom 404 page that tells visitors clearly the page cannot be found, keeps your site's look and navigation, and links to popular pages, while making sure "the server returns a 404 HTTP status code to prevent having the pages indexed."
What if pages that should exist start returning 404?
Treat it as urgent. A real page answering 404 drops out of the index, and a whole template doing it after a deploy takes that section of your site out of search as Google recrawls it. The pattern to watch is a sudden rise in the Not found row at the same time as indexed pages fall.
Common causes are a routing change that renamed a path segment, a trailing-slash setting that changed, a CMS slug edited without a redirect, a deleted category that orphaned its products, and a build that failed to generate some static pages. Check a few affected URLs with curl:
If a page you expect returns 404, restore it or add the 301 to its new URL, then run Test live URL in URL Inspection and click Request indexing for the key pages. Google says it keeps retrying known URLs for a while, so it will request the restored URLs again even without a request from you.
Should you click Validate fix on the 404 row?
Only if you fixed every URL in it. Validation fails as soon as Google finds an instance still returning 404, and a row that mixes fixed URLs with 404s you are keeping on purpose will never pass. For those rows, fix what needs fixing and let the rest age out, since the report drops URLs that have not returned 404 in the past month.
Do not use the Removals tool to clear the list. Google's 404 post says the removal tool "removes URLs from Google's search results," is "designed for urgent removal requests only," and is unnecessary for a URL that already returns 404, since such a URL "will drop out of our search results naturally over time."
Check your own links and sitemap for dead URLs
To find the 404s you are responsible for, run the free scan on LaunchScaler. It needs only the URL, no account, and runs 156 checks across 6 of its 7 categories at no cost. Its checks flag internal links that resolve to a 4xx, sitemap entries that do not return a clean 200, broken internal links and sitemap URLs that waste AI crawler requests, soft 404s where a missing page answers 200, and redirect chains longer than one hop. Those are the 404s your own site creates, which are the ones Google's help tells you to fix.
Not by themselves. Google has said that URLs returning 404 do not affect how your other pages perform in search. They matter when the missing URL is a page you care about, or when your own links and sitemap send people and crawlers to it.
03
Which 404 errors should I fix?
Fix a 404 when the URL is in your sitemap, when your own pages link to it, or when other sites link to it. Leave 404s for pages you removed on purpose and for URLs that never existed.
04
Should I redirect all 404 pages to the homepage?
No. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the home page can be treated as a soft 404. Redirect each URL to its closest equivalent, or let it return 404.
05
How long do 404 errors stay in Search Console?
The Page indexing report shows only URLs that returned 404 in the past month. Google keeps retrying known URLs for a while but crawls them less and less often, and there is no way to make it forget a URL.
Page with redirect means the URL redirects, so Google indexes its target instead. Ignore it unless your sitemap or internal links still use the old URL.
Redirect error means Googlebot hit a loop, a chain that was too long, an overlong URL or a bad URL. Trace every hop with curl, then redirect in one step.
