Fix Google Crawl Errors 404

Table of Contents

1. 404 Is Normal
2. Reference

Introduction

Crawl errors are common when managing a website. This post explains why 404 errors appear in Google Search Console and how to fix them by redirecting broken URLs.

404 Is Normal

Crawl errors sometimes show 404 because your page no longer exists, another website points to your page but it doesn't exist, or you changed the domain and folder structure of your URL.

You could look at the crawl errors list and let them all return 404, but depending on the page, I think it might drive traffic to the site, so I would redirect it to the parent page.

For example, my blog usually starts from /blog/Post/{then the page}. However, I found out there are lots of 404 errors for /Home/Blog/{page url} or /mobile/blog/post/{page url}. So I redirect them to the parent page. The following is using Node.js.

app.get('/home/blogs/*', routes.views.blog);
    app.get('/mobile/blog/post/:post', routes.views.blog);

Reference

• Not found error

Conclusion

404 crawl errors are normal and can happen for various reasons. Instead of ignoring them, you can redirect old or broken URLs to the appropriate parent page to retain traffic and improve your site's SEO health.