404 Not Found
Every 404 is a visitor you paid for, walking into a wall.
One missing page is a shrug. A pattern of them is a leak: rankings quietly reassigned, ad clicks billed and bounced, and link equity you earned over years evaporating into 'Not Found.'
Diagnosis within one business day (Mon–Fri). Flat quote before any fix.
What’s actually happening
A 404 means the URL exists in the wild — in Google's index, in someone's bookmark, in your own menu — but your server has nothing there anymore. The page moved, the slug changed, the product sold out, or a migration renamed everything and told no one.
Google treats persistent 404s as a signal to drop the URL — along with every ranking and backlink it had accumulated. The cure is rarely 'recreate the page'; it's the 301 redirect, which forwards both the visitor and the accumulated authority to the page's new home.
The usual causes, ranked
After twenty-seven years of these calls, the odds are well mapped. Start at the top.
A redesign or migration that changed URLs without redirects
The classic self-inflicted wound: new site, new slugs, and every old URL — the ones Google ranks — left to die. Traffic drops track it within weeks.
Deleted or renamed pages and products
Out-of-stock products, retired services, renamed categories. Each deletion orphans every link pointing at it.
Internal links that never got updated
Your own menus, footers, and in-content links pointing at old paths — the most embarrassing 404s because you're generating them yourself.
Typos in campaigns and external links
An ad pointing at a mistyped URL bills you for every click it bounces. External sites mislinking you deserve a redirect that catches their traffic anyway.
What you can safely try first
Nothing below can make things worse — that’s the selection criterion. Anything riskier belongs in professional hands, on a backup.
- 1
Pull the list from Search Console
Indexing → Pages → Not Found. That's Google's own inventory of your dead URLs, sorted by discovery — the exact map of where authority is leaking.
- 2
Click your own navigation
Menus, footer, and the links inside your top ten pages. Internal 404s are the fastest wins because you control both ends.
- 3
Check your ad destinations
Every active campaign's final URLs. A paused-worthy discovery: ads happily spend on pages that no longer exist.
Stop and call when…
- The 404 list is dozens deep after a redesign — that's a redirect map job, not a one-off
- Rankings already dropped and you need the equity recovered, not just the errors silenced
- The 404s are actually soft-404s or crawl errors you can't interpret
From there it’s our job: a look within one business day, flat quote, and the $149 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
Error Fix — buy it now, skip the hunt.
One error message, found and gone: memory limits, stuck updates, failed publishing, upload and SSL errors, broken forms.
A full backup before we touch anything, the fix tested on desktop and phone, and a short note on what broke and why. We start within one business day (Monday–Friday) of payment. Full refund if we can't fix it.
Questions we hear a lot.
Do 404s hurt SEO directly?
A few stray ones, no — the web has always had dead ends. A pattern of them on URLs that held rankings and backlinks, yes: Google drops the URLs and the authority they carried. The damage is the lost equity, and 301 redirects recover it.
Should I redirect every 404 to my homepage?
No — that's the lazy fix, and Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s. Each dead URL should land on its closest living equivalent: the new product page, the replacement service, the category. Relevance is what preserves the equity.
What's a 301 vs a 302 redirect?
301 is permanent — 'the page moved, transfer the authority.' 302 is temporary — 'back soon, keep the old listing.' For dead URLs you almost always want the 301; the wrong one strands your equity in limbo.
Can you fix a whole migration's worth?
Yes — that's the common job: crawl the old URL set, map every dead path to its right destination, and ship the redirect table in one pass. Flat-quoted once we see the size of the map.
Related symptoms & help
Errors travel in packs. If this one visited, check its friends.
- Site Not IndexedWhen Google can't find you at all.
- Rankings DroppedThe symptom 404s often cause.
- SEO ServicesRedirects are triage; this is the offense.
- Website RedesignRedesigns done with the redirect map built in.
- Website RepairThe full bench for everything else.
- White ScreenWhite screen of death
- Hacked SiteHacked WordPress
- Database ErrorDatabase connection error
Stop paying for traffic that hits a wall.
Send the symptom, get a look within one business day and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.