: How can I keep mediawiki not-yet-created pages from cluttering my google webmaster console with 404s? we have a mediawiki install as part of our site. As on all wikis people will add links

@Candy875

404s do not directly affect your rankings.

404s are bad when the user is expecting there to be a page and there is not as this can badly affect user experience which can indirectly affect rankings.

If you just want to solve them to make your search console data look neat then you would have to stop the search robots from crawling the pages.

If there is a clear pattern to the URL then you could use the robots.txt file them remove this when the page exists.

If there isn't then I don't see there being any safe way of stopping these 404s from being reported without changing the functionality of the site itself (To not create 404 pages)

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