: Will 404 errors affect search engine ranking? I had installed joomla in my domain with the sample data. I now removed it and installed wordpress in my domain. There are a lot of 404 errors

@Jamie184

Yes it surely effects site ranking and its indexing if there are many 404 errors it is advisable to check the health section of Webmaster Tools in Google and try to fix up the issue for better ranking and visibility of website.

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@Harper822

There is no clear argument how error 404 can affect your site ranking, the truth is that while error 404 may not affect your site's ranking it could affect user experience on your site, and yes in a way or the other it can affect your site ranking.

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@Alves908

I just wanted to add my experience. Last March, I started a website and it was steadily moving up the serps. One day, it disappeared completely. I did everything I could think of to try to bring it back. I added fresh content and more backlinks but nothing worked. A month later, I decided to log into my webmaster account to see what was up (I forgot I had set up a webmaster account for this site). I found a ton of 404 errors. I immediately went to work cleaning them up. A couple days later, my site was back in the serps. I do think that 404 errors can and does affect search engine rankings.

I've got another site that disappeared from the serps on Jan 13. I couldn't understand why because, on that same day, I decided to add some new content to the site and that usually causes the site to move up in the serps, even for a day or two. Today, I decide to log into my webmaster account (I should do this more often) and I found ten 404 errors discovered on Jan 13 - the same day the website disappeared from the serps. I fixed the errors and I bet in a few days, the site will have it's search rankings back.

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@Kristi941

Sure If a page has an outgoing like for 404 page then search engine will add an negative point to it. So automatically SERP for the result will reduce.

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@Pope3001725

Google just wrote a blog post that should answer your question very well


Q: Do the 404 errors reported in
Webmaster Tools affect my site’s
ranking?

A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of
the web; the Internet is always
changing, new content is born, old
content dies, and when it dies it
(ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response
code. Search engines are aware of
this; we have 404 errors on our own
sites, as you can see above, and we
find them all over the web. In fact,
we actually prefer that, when you get
rid of a page on your site, you make
sure that it returns a proper 404 or
410 response code (rather than a “soft
404”). Keep in mind that in order for
our crawler to see the HTTP response
code of a URL, it has to be able to
crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked
by your robots.txt file we won’t be
able to crawl it and see its response
code. The fact that some URLs on your
site no longer exist / return 404s
does not affect how your site’s other
URLs (the ones that return 200
(Successful)) perform in our search
results.

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@Annie201

Check my answer here.
It's for 403 pages but it does the job in your case, too.

PS: good choice to choose WordPress over Joomla!.

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