How to fix "404 Not Found" crawl errors reported by Google in Search Console

Question

I was checking on Google webmaster tools for my blog site to see if there's any indication on why my blog traffic decreased to half in one day and i saw 43 Not Found crawl errors and 5 in Sitemap Not Found errors.

The 5 Not Found errors in Sitemap were the links to categories. I guess I renamed categories that's why Google can't find the links.

As for the 43 other Not Found errors, I see blog post titles that contain ' or . For example "McDonald's" or "O.N.E." They weren't found by Google crawler. There is also a blog post with /CachedYou at the end and a blog post with /www.example.com attached at the end. They weren't found by Google crawlers either.

How do I correct those Not Found Errors?

Solution

There's a blog post on this topic on Google's Webmaster Central blog, it covers most of the questions around 404 errors.

Generally speaking:

• If these are pages that you removed, then the 404 HTTP result code is fine.
• If these are pages that changed addresses, then you should 301 redirect to the new addresses. How you do this depends on your setup, for Apache-servers you may be able to use the .htaccess file for this.
• Unless these are pages that used to receive a lot of traffic from search, these 404s won't be the reason for your site's traffic dropping like that. Google understands that the web changes and that URLs disappear - that is not a reason for Google to stop showing your site.

So my recommendation would be to check the URLs that are listed as 404 crawl errors. If any are important, then set up redirects to the appropriate new URLs as soon as you can. If none of them are important, then keep this in mind as something worth cleaning up when you have time, but focus on the rest of your site first. Often drastic drops in traffic are due more to the general quality of the website, so that's what I'd recommend working on first.

Comments

[Freeme]

Most of the URLs listed in 404 Not Found never existed before. My contents are original contents that I made myself except few of the PR materials and I cited the source too.

[John Mueller]

If the URLs never existed before, then you can probably just ignore those crawl errors and focus on the rest of your site.