When your users are browsing the internet and searching for information the one thing that can be frustrating is coming across a webpage that doesn’t exist and seeing a 404 error page. Something should be there provided by your web developer. This includes a message with options to continue to search on the site or links that are related to what the user came there for in the first place.
What are 404 errors and do they effect my SEO?
The short answer is no, not at all. A “404” is a “Page not found” error. This is not terrible, Google just assumes that you are moving things around and it will return shortly (or by the next time Google crawls your site). A “410” error means that the page is gone completely from the site and the search engine sees that it is. While any errors on your site should be addressed, it’s not time to panic if you have these.
Matt Cutt’s takes questions regularly and answers them on the YouTube channel for Google’s webmaster tools. The latest question relates to how Google treats pages on a website that are not found by the search engine after they’ve crawled your site.
