Google: 404s Are Not A Signal Of Low Quality

Mar 17, 2017 - 7:44 am 31 by

Google 404 Quality

For years and years, Google has been trying to communicate that 404s, page not found results, are a normal part of the web. Pages don't always live forever. 404s are not a bad thing, they are a normal thing. Of course, you don't want to return a 404 for a page that should exist, but a normal 404 is, um, normal.

That being said, John Mueller once again said, 404s are not a signal of having a low quality site.

This statement came on Twitter this morning in response to that question. Here it is:

40x status codes are not a sign of a low quality site, it just means there are certain URLs on your site that do not exist and that is okay.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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