: 404 Google crawl error redirect 301 is it correct or not? I got lot of 404 not found link in google crawl error am tried to fixed that 404 issue like below code in .htaccess, redirect 301

@Odierno851

Google show you 404 error report so you can know the list of pages is not found by Googlebot while crawling other pages. 404 Does not harm your site at all, but you can make it better by checking how they find links.

When to fix 404 error?

Let's say you have changed your site structure and your URL is slietly change, now if you see that kind of 404 error then do 301 redirection, because it is helpful for users as well as for bots. When you do 301 redirection, then PageRank is also passed on that link, it means you page URL position in search result will be same even after you change your site url structure.

When to not fix 404 error?

Now if you see 404 error page, because some bad/low/dead website point to your site URL, then you don't need to do any redirection. Even that kind of 10k links does not affect your site at all.

Google know that, webmaster should not waste their time by fixing bad links. So it does not hurt your site at all. Just leave that, it will disappear automatically after few months.

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@Barnes591

You need to understand above issue slightly more in detail.

Firstly, 500 links with 404 indicates poor planning as the number is way too high.

There may be some issues if you redirect all 500 blindly to the home page. Let's say out of those if you got ranking on some pages due to some backlinks and if you redirect blindly then it may indicate high volume of backlinks on the home page and it may lead to some issues if the link pattern may not be right.

So, i would say instead of redirecting all to home page it's better to do those link assessment and you may find some set of those links might be related some of your current live pages and if so redirect to relevant pages.

Understand from user side, if you send them to incorrect page it won't be a good user experience, so do your best to redirect to relevant pages.

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@Hamaas447

If you can visit the webpage but if meanwhile, the same page returns a 404 in google search console, it means there is a problem. It means visitors can see the webpage but googlebot can't.

You should check the webpage that returns a 404 by going to "crawl" and "fetch as google" in Google search console to see if Googlebot can visit your page.

In case a webpage returns a 404 only for google bot, you should check in your htaccess file(s) if nothing could prevent google bot to visit your webpage.

This can be also a code if you used dynamic pages (asp, php, jsp).

Also, an application firewall can block googlebot and return a 404.

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