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.'
Same-day diagnosis. 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: same-day look, flat quote, and the $229 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
Single Error Fix — buy it now, skip the hunt.
One error, hunted down and fixed — 500s, white screens, redirect loops, broken pages.
Covers one specific error or broken behavior on one site. Diagnosis, the fix, and a plain-English note on what happened. If we can't fix it, you get a full refund.
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.
Stop paying for traffic that hits a wall.
Send the symptom, get a same-day look and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.