What "404 Not Found" means, and when it's a problem
Google treats a 404 as a normal part of the web: an indexed URL that answers 404 drops out, and gets crawled less and less often. Search Console lists them as Not found (404) under Indexing > Pages (more on that report). For a page you removed without a replacement, they can stay there.
Look closer in three cases. When a page you care about answers 404, find out why; if it moved, 301 it. If your own pages link to it, fix those broken links. And if another site links to a misspelt URL of a real page, redirect that one to the right page. URLs that never existed, the guesses of bots and scrapers, can be left alone.
First check what the URL really answers, because a page can say "not found" while the server answers 200 underneath. In Chrome DevTools, open the Network tab and reload: the Status column of the first request has the code. Or run curl -I https://example.com/old-page in a terminal.
A removed article on marketingtracer.com, in Chrome DevTools.
You remove a page: 301, 404 or 410?
One question decides it: does another page on your site answer what this one answered?
- Yes. 301 the old URL to that page. The homepage or a category that doesn't answer the question doesn't count. Google's Martin Splitt in 2025: "If it's gone, don't redirect me to the homepage."
- No. Let it answer 404 or 410. Google says "All 4xx errors, except 429, are treated the same".
In Reboot Online's 2022 test on 119 pages, Google recrawled 404s 49.6% more often than 410s; the test couldn't tell which left the index faster. Use 410 when your CMS can set it, but it isn't worth a developer ticket.
- Take the page out of your own menus, internal links and sitemap. A crawl of your own site finds the links you forgot. In MarketingTracer's SEO Audit, set Kind to Not found (4xx) on the Pages tab: it lists every URL the crawl reached that answers 404 or 410, for each client site. It only sees links on the site itself, and it doesn't look for soft 404s.
On 29 October 2026 ten old articles came off my own site, marketingtracer.com. In the 90 days before, their English and Dutch versions had 22,190 impressions and 17 clicks together; /seo/above-the-fold alone had 14,525 impressions and not a single click at an average position of 18.2. Six other articles had a page that covers their subject, so they were merged into it and 301 there (/seo/google-panda to /seo/google-algorithm, for one). At first the Dutch versions of the ten sent a 302 to the English 404; the same day, every removed path got its own 410.
Just be honest, I always say: only redirect when another page answers the same question. Those ten had nothing like that, so they're gone, and gone gets a 410. Sending people to the homepage helps nobody. Google usually sees such a redirect for what it is, a "not found" in disguise: a soft 404, which the next section explains.
How to find and fix a soft 404
A soft 404 is a page that says it doesn't exist, or shows next to nothing, while the server answers 200 OK. Google leaves such pages out of search and reports them in Page indexing as Soft 404. The usual causes are the homepage redirect from step 1, a custom 404 page served with status 200, an empty search result or category page, and a JavaScript app that shows "not found" without sending a 404.
A page that's gone or moved gets the fix from the steps above. In a JavaScript app, redirect to a URL that answers 404, or add noindex. If the page should exist, run URL Inspection > Test live URL > View tested page: a missing file or an error message shows up there. Left alone, soft 404s stay out of search and keep getting crawled anyway.
What your 404 page should show
Google ignores what's on a custom 404 page, so build it for the visitor. The tips Google gives make sense: say in friendly words that the page can't be found, keep the site's look and navigation, link to your most visited pages and the homepage, and offer a way to report the broken link. A search box helps too.
That page must answer 404 itself, at the address the visitor asked for. Sending people to /404.html with a 302, where it answers 200, turns every missing URL into a soft 404. A meta refresh to the homepage after five seconds is the homepage redirect again, only slower. Run the status check on /this-page-does-not-exist: it should read 404.