404 error

A 404 is one of the most common responses on the web. It fires when someone (or a bot) requests a URL that the server has no resource for, usually because a page was deleted, renamed, or the link was mistyped.

How Google treats a 404

When Googlebot hits a URL that returns 404, Google does not use any content it finds there. Google’s documentation states that all 4xx responses except 429 are handled the same way: the crawler informs the indexing pipeline that the content does not exist. If the URL was already indexed it gets dropped, newly discovered 404s are never processed, and Google gradually crawls that address less often.

A 404 is not a penalty. Broken links and removed pages are a normal part of the web, and a handful of them will not drag down the rest of your site. The risk is scale and intent: if pages that still hold value or backlinks quietly start returning 404, you lose that traffic and the link equity pointing at them.

Two related traps. A soft 404 returns 200 OK but shows empty or error-like content, which confuses crawlers. And a genuine 404 differs from 410 Gone, which explicitly signals permanent removal. Serve a helpful custom 404 page (search box, links to top content) and reserve redirects for cases where an equivalent page exists.

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8